Zim farming shows signs of recovery
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From: as on 29 Jul 2010 05:39 Zim farming shows signs of recovery http://www.zimonline.co.za by Tafadzwa Mutasa Thursday 29 July 2010 HARARE - Zimbabwe is experiencing a recovery in its troubled agriculture sector, a decade after President Robert Mugabe started a chaotic and often violent land seizure drive, but funding problems could stymie aid programmes helping rural farmers to recover, a U.N. official said. The southern African country, which was once a breadbasket of the region, had since 2001 experienced acute food shortages and had to rely on foreign food handouts to feed itself. But that could soon end after the harvest of the staple maize crop increased again this year. "There was an improvement from 1.2 million tonnes (in 2008/9) to 1.3 million tonnes," Jacopo D'Amelio, a regional information coordinator with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told the media. "There's also a feeling that the food security situation is improving from what it was in 2008, when the country had probably its worst output," he said. Zimbabwe plunged into an unprecedented humanitarian and political crisis in 2008 after Mugabe was defeated at the polls by longtime rival Morgan Tsvangirai but regained power after a brutal and violent run-off election that forced his opponent to pullout. While inflation rocketed to more than 500 billion percent, the country suffered Africa 's worst cholera outbreak in 15 years and food shortages escalated. But FAO said international aid for the once famine-threatened country, better use of land by rural farmers, and the end of hyperinflation, have led to the improvement in farm output. International aid agencies, led by the European Union have since late 2008, when Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed a power-sharing agreement, been shifting from providing food handouts to supplying fertiliser, seed and extension support to rural farmers, who have traditionally produced the bulk of Zimbabwe's maize crop. The fragile unity government has however struggled to attract critical funding from Western donors, who clashed with Mugabe in the past over policy differences and now want more political and economic reforms from Harare before releasing financial support. "Donors are putting in less money," D'Amelio said. At the peak of Zimbabwe's economic crisis in 2008, aid agencies fed half of the country's population. The U.S. Agency for International Development's famine early-warning systems network has cautioned in a recent report that Zimbabwe 's dry regions would need food toward the end of this year. Aid groups last year provided inputs to more than 700,000 households, and the EU has through FAO already identified nearly 500,000 families that will benefit from the inputs programme this year. D'Amelio said aid agencies would continue to support vulnerable households and consider extending programmes to sell subsidized fertiliser and seed to those who can pay. Relief agencies say combined donor support to small farmers accounted for up to 20 percent of Zimbabwe 's maize output of 1.3 million tonnes in the 2009/10 season. - ZimOnline. |