International > Food Warning Issued for Zimbabwe

Drought and Economic Crisis Will Leave 4 Million Hungry in Zimbabwe

Children receive nutritional drinks at a WFP (World Food Pragram) food distribution point in Harare.  (AP Photo)

A poor harvest coupled with a worsening economic crisis will leave more than a third of Zimbabwe's population in need of food assistance by early 2008, two U.N. food agencies said Tuesday.

Around 2.1 million people in the country's southern provinces will face serious food shortages by the third quarter of 2007, and the number will reach 4.1 million of the country's 12 million population in the first three months of 2008, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program said.

About 352,000 tons of cereals and 90,000 tons of other food aid will be needed, the Rome-based agencies said in a joint statement.

While drought has affected other countries, Zimbabwe's poor harvest is being "exacerbated by the country's unprecedented economic decline, extremely high unemployment and the impact of HIV/AIDS," said Amir Abdulla, WFP's regional director for southern Africa.

The country's hyperinflation and the plummeting of the Zimbabwe dollar also have drastically reduced the population's buying power, limiting access to food supplies for low and middle incomes, he said.

Zimbabwe's economic meltdown is blamed largely on political turmoil since President Robert Mugabe ordered the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned commercial farms in 2000 that disrupted the agriculture-based economy in the former regional breadbasket, leading to acute shortages of food and most basic goods.

Mugabe has said that his land redistribution program was intended to correct colonial-era imbalances in ownership. He and his ministerial colleagues have frequently accused labor and business of refusing to cooperate in recovery programs.

2007-06-06