Failed Harvest & Failed Policy Puts Zimbabwe On Verge Of Massive Starvation
The power sharing deal between Robert Mugabe (brutal dictator for decades) and opposition member Morgan Tsvangirai was a bad idea when Thabo Mbeki created the arrangement and it’s no better today. Morgan Tsvangirai won the election but was forced into agreeing to a power-sharing deal with the man who has controlled every inch of the government. As long as Robert Mugabe has any connection to the government and is not prosecuted for crimes against humanity, nothing will change in Zimbabwe. Nothing.
Aid experts are warning that millions of Zimbabwe’s people face starvation as the country’s political leaders remain deadlocked over a power-sharing deal and the economy heads for total collapse.
While officials of the Southern African Development Community prepare for a meeting tomorrow in Swaziland, where they will try to persuade President Robert Mugabe and opposition leaders to resume negotiations, the United Nations World Food Programme has warned that the number of Zimbabweans needing food aid is expected to double by early next year, to just over five million. The UN has appealed for an extra $140m (£81m) to deal with the crisis.
Richard Lee, a WFP spokesman in Johannesburg, said the organisation was already giving emergency food aid to 2.5 million people in Zimbabwe after the failure of this year’s maize harvest. On top of erratic weather, which resulted in droughts in some areas and flooding in others, there were shortages of seed and fertilisers. The government, which buys all grain production, had also failed to set a price that would encourage farmers to grow more than they needed for their own families.
But the “worst thing”, the WFP official added, was the decision of Mr Mugabe’s government to ban all foreign aid work for three months earlier this year, during the violence-racked second round of the presidential election. The ban was lifted at the end of August. “This delayed the launch of our programme to feed some 1.7 million people,” Mr Lee told The Independent on Sunday. “They were more vulnerable as a result.”
(Source)
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