ZIMBABWE will require at least $131 million in aid this year, the bulk for food assistance after a failed farming season left nearly 1,7 million facing hunger, United Nations agencies said on Tuesday.
Report by Reuters/VOA
The southern African country, once a regional breadbasket, has struggled to feed itself since 2000 when President Robert Mugabe began a drive to seize white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.
A third of the 2012 maize crop was written off after a prolonged dry spell.
The call for assistance for Zimbabwe, whose economy was ravaged by hyperinflation between 2003 and 2008, was part of an $8,5 billion global appeal launched in December by the UN for aid agencies to help 51 million people cope with humanitarian emergencies in 2013.
The UN agencies said while the humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe had improved after the formation of a unity government by Mugabe and his rival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in 2009, problems remained.
“Humanitarian challenges remain, that include food insecurity mainly caused by drought, and sporadic outbreaks of waterborne diseases,” the UN office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.
The UN said the southern part of Zimbabwe will continue to experience drought in 2013, raising the prospect of another poor harvest.
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Zimbabwe was a net exporter of food to the region until its agro-based economy took a nosedive in the early 2000s. Mugabe’s government embarked on a chaotic land reform programme displacing experienced white commercial farmers. They were replaced with black peasant farmers who had little — if any — knowledge of commercial farming, nor the money to provide needed irrigation. Since then the country has been depending on food handouts to feed its people. At the launch of the UN appeal Tuesday, a senior official in Zimbabwe’s ministry of regional integration and international cooperation, Tedious Chifamba, said Harare was tackling its problems. “Zimbabwe is neither a classic humanitarian case nor is it a failed state,” Chifamba said. “There are more deserving cases out there which are competing with us which are indeed victims of extreme weather conditions . . . Or natural or man made calamities such as volcanoes, earthquakes tsunamis, wars, etcetera.” UN officials say this year’s appeal is about $70 million less than last year’s because of the steady improvement in the humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe brought about by recovery in some key sectors of the economy.
