Food insecurity in Zimbabwe
October 16, 2013
The children may be able to recite a poem for visitors at Jotsholo Primary School some 700 kilometers (434 miles) from the Zimbabwean capital Harare, but this is still the region worst affected by the country's food crisis. Most of the 2.2 million Zimbabweans who depend on food aid live here. It has been like this for more than a decade.
Before the turn of the century, Zimbabwe, with its fertile farmland, was the breadbasket of southern Africa, exporting wheat and corn to the rest of the continent and beyond. But the agriculture second nose-dived in the early 2000s, a development which critics attribute to President Robert Mugabe's land reform program which targeted white farmers.
David Phiri is the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Zimbabwe. He told DW that the country had the potential to regain its status as southern Africa's bread basket, but political will was needed and he thought that the "Zimbabwean government has shown that it has political will."
Cannot afford to buy food
But Zimbabwe is still a net importer of food. With unemployment hovering at around 80 percent, many people can't afford to buy food. They are dependent on hand-outs from donors and Zimbabwe's cash-strapped government.
As the country marked World Food Day, one Zimbabwean Tabeth Ncube told DW there was a lot of hunger around. "My suggestion to the government for us to avoid starvation is that it must ask us to do some menial jobs locally and then give us handouts at the end of the month," she said.
Another Zimbabwean, 72 year-old Albert Sibanda refuted suggestions that they were to blame. "It is not that we are lazy. We depend on natural rains and they have been erratic. There isn't enough rain," he observed.
Before the destruction of commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe, farmers depended on irrigation to mitigate the effects of drought. That is now history.