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UN to Boost Food Aid to Zimbabwe - Social and Economic Policy - Global Policy Forum UN to Boost Food Aid to Zimbabwe
By David Brough
Reuters
December 12, 2003
The UN food aid agency plans to boost handouts to Zimbabweans in the coming weeks as maize supplies are running out before the harvest and AIDS has killed farm workers and cut food output, a senior official said on Friday.
Millions of Zimbabweans are hungry because of the impact of drought, economic crisis and AIDS, aid agencies say. "Our main problem today is very rapidly obtaining cash or commodities so that we can make it through the critical period prior to the harvest," Jean-Jacques Graisse, Deputy Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told Reuters.
"Zimbabwe has one of (Africa's) highest HIV infection rates and that does create very great problems for agricultural production," Graisse said in an interview at WFP headquarters. With adult HIV prevalence rates of around 25 percent in Zimbabwe, many farm workers have died and the country has been left with close to one million AIDS orphans, Graisse said.
WFP, the world's biggest food aid agency, aims to feed 2.6 million Zimbabweans this month and up to 4.5 million between January and March 2004 before the harvest, Graisse said.
Zimbabwe's food shortages are expected to be the worst in southern Africa in 2004, he added. Aid agencies say 5.5 million people in Zimbabwe, more than a third of its population, will need food aid by the end of 2003. Many of the hungry are unemployed farm workers, victims of Zimbabwe's seizure of white-owned farms for black resettlement.
The cash-strapped country, which has suffered chronic shortages of foreign currency and fuel since 1999, is unable to import its own food. Renson Gasela, shadow farm minister for the Zimbabwean opposition Movement for Democratic Change, has said Zimbabwe will run out of maize by January unless President Robert Mugabe's government makes an urgent appeal for more aid. Graisse said WFP planned to send 346,000 tonnes of food, much of it maize, to Zimbabwe between July 2003 and June 2004.
Time Squeeze
Donors had so far provided about half of the $197 million sought by WFP to feed Zimbabweans, but the agency needed pledges quickly because of the time it takes before commitments can be converted into food handouts, he added. "Because of the time lag between when the pledges are made and the food reaches the people, we are going to have problems in the coming three months," Graisse said without elaborating.
Zimbabwe would swallow about half of WFP's food resources allocated for southern African countries in 2004, he said. "People are eating whatever they can put their hands on, but because of the assistance which has been provided, the situation is still under control," Graisse said.
He said hunger in Zimbabwe was exacerbated by soaring prices of food, seeds and fertilisers. "There may not be enough seeds available for the planting season which starts now," he said.
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