UN’s FAO says Zimbabwe food security improving
Tue Jul 27, 2010 12:03pm EDT
* Economic stability helping wobbly farm sector
* Aid cut and food shortages on the horizon
* Aid to small farmers helps yield 20% of national output
By Nelson Banya
HARARE, July 27 (Reuters) – Zimbabwe’s troubled farm sector has started to
recover from depths plumbed two years ago when it faced a food crisis, but
funding problems could cut into programmes helping farmers recover, a U.N.
official said.
“There was an improvement from 1.2 million tonnes to 1.3 million tonnes,”
Jacopo D’Amelio, a regional information coordinator with the U.N. Food and
Agriculture Organisation, said in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday.
“There’s also a feeling that the food security situation is improving from
what it was in 2008, when the country had probably its worst output,” he
said.
International aid for the once famine-threatened country, better use of
land, and the end of hyperinflation have led to the improvement.
The southern African country, once a regional bread basket, has failed to
feed itself since 2000 following President Robert Mugabe’s seizure of
white-owned commercial farms to resettle landless blacks, leading to sharp
falls in production.
The economy, crippled when inflation hit 500 billion percent in late 2008,
has stabilised under a coalition government set up last year by bitter
rivals Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. [ID:nLDE66D1OM]
The new administration has struggled to attract crucial aid from Western
donors, who clashed with Mugabe in the past over policy differences and now
want more political and economic reforms from Harare before releasing
financial support.
“Donors are putting in less money,” D’Amelio said.
Aid agencies, which at the peak of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis in 2008 fed
about 7 million people, or about half its population, have shifted from
handouts to providing seed, fertiliser and technical support to restore
security of food supplies.
D’Amelio said aid agencies would continue to support vulnerable households
and would consider extending programmes to sell fertiliser and seeds at
discounted prices to those who can pay.
Relief agencies say combined donor support to small farmers accounted for up
to 20 percent of Zimbabwe’s maize output of 1.3 million tonnes in the
2009-10 season.
Separately, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s famine
early-warning systems network cautioned in a recent report that Zimbabwe’s
dry regions would need food toward the end of this year. (Editing by Jon
Herskovitz and Jane Baird)