ZIMBABWE: The UN World Food Programme yesterday warned that Zimbabwe's food crisis was deteriorating rapidly, with the government and foreign aid agencies apparently unable to mobilise enough stocks to feed millions of people.
The WFP said there was a rise in hunger-related diseases, children were dropping out of school and families were resorting to desperate measures such as surviving on wild fruit to cope with shortages affecting half the southern African country's population.
Many children were going to school without eating, others were having only tea without sugar for breakfast and wild fruit for lunch, the WFP said.
Many more children have dropped out of school altogether, some turning to work as casual labourers for survival.
Most poor families around the country were eating one meal a day, it said.
"The humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe is deteriorating at a dangerously rapid pace," it said in a statement issued in Harare.
"At the same time, there is a growing concern that food imports by both the government and humanitarian agencies are falling far short of the amount required to feed the Zimbabwean people up until March."
Nearly half of Zimbabwe's 14 million people are facing severe food shortages due to drought, although many people also blame the crisis on President Robert Mugabe's controversial land reform programme which has disrupted the country's commercial agricultural sector.
The WFP says its food distribution operations in Zimbabwe have been allowed to proceed relatively unimpeded, although there have been reports that the government has interfered with other food aid projects with an aim to prevent food from reaching its political opponents.
The WFP said Zimbabwe's state-run grain marketing board, which has a monopoly on distributing food, has a limited capacity to import enough cereal due to an acute foreign exchange shortage.
The WFP and its non-governmental partner organisations managed to distribute 20,000 tonnes of food to two million people in October, but were struggling to get sufficient resources for the critical months ahead.
"We are approaching the very worst period of the crisis, when 6.7 million Zimbabweans will need food aid and yet WFP does not even have the resources to meet our target of three million beneficiaries in November," it said. "It is an extremely serious situation and it is only going to get worse," said Mr Kevin Farrell, WFP representative in Zimbabwe.
The WFP said it faces a food shortfall of nearly 200,000 tonnes in Zimbabwe between now and March 2003, threatening its ability to reach all the needy. The number of people requiring food aid is expected to rise from three million in November to 5.8 million by January.
"We will all have to work non-stop over the coming months if we are to prevent millions of people from starving in Zimbabwe.
"The government, humanitarian agencies and the international community need to do everything possible to increase the flow of food into the country, otherwise the suffering that we are already seeing is only going to become more widespread and more acute," Mr Farrell said. - (Reuters)