- I have heard that a lot of blacks who were "given
land" are actually packing their bags and leaving "their land".
They can't survive on it! Nice going eh? Ruined farms and now everyone
is suffering and dying. 60% of Zimbabwe's foreign exchange is coming from
ex-Patriate Zimbabweans sending their families money. Blacks are leaving
by the planeload. Here in South Africa, Zimbabweans are buying food and
paying people to take it to their families up there! People coming here
for business, buy food in South African supermarkets to take to Zimbabwe.
In this way, countless people are being kept alive through gifts of food
from blacks who have fled here. The border is clogged with traffic. The
struggle for survival is on. -Jan
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- Maize Harvest Enough For One Day
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- The Financial Gazette - Zimbabwe
10-2-2
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- Zimbabwe is expected to harvest about 6,000 tonnes of
maize - enough to feed the nation for one day - from an ambitious winter
cropping programme launched by the government in April this year, farming
industry officials said this week.
-
- They said that just over 6,000 tonnes of winter maize
were expected to be harvested from about 1,500 hectares of land put under
maize at the ambitious Masvingo Food Initiative which the government says
will alleviate the food crisis presently faced by Zimbabwe.
-
- The government however says more than 1 800 hectares
of land were planted with the irrigated maize crop and are expected to
produce at least 18,000 tonnes of the crop.
-
- But the officials said the maximum yield expected from
the project was four tonnes an hectare. Harvesting of the winter crop is
expected to start in the next few weeks.
-
- "The expected harvest is enough to meet the country's
maize requirements for one to one-and-a-half days only, which means the
initiative is just a scratch on the surface as far as the severity of the
food crisis is concerned," a senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture
told the Financial Gazette.
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- Zimbabwe, which consumes about 6,000 tonnes of maize
a day, faces a severe food crisis blamed on a severe drought and the government's
chaotic land reform programme, which has almost decimated the country's
key agricultural sector.
-
- An estimated seven million people, or half the population,
now face starvation and are surviving on handouts from international aid
donors and the government.
-
- The Masvingo Food Initiative, which took advantage of
land donated by Triangle and Hippo Valley estates in the hot and arid southern
Lowveld region, was one of the measures adopted by the government to alleviate
unprecedented human suffering in the wake of failed attempts by former
finance minister Simba Makoni to raise funds for food imports.
-
- The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP), which
is currently delivering more than 11,000 tonnes of grain a month to Zimbabweans,
has also appealed for US$507 million in food aid for six southern African
countries.
-
- But donors have so far committed about one third of that
amount and the WFP is negotiating for another third in donations.
-
- Opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) shadow
agriculture minister Renson Gasela said the best that could come out of
the Masvingo maize project was 9,000 tonnes, assuming that the average
yield is five tonnes a hectare and that 1,800 hectares were indeed planted.
-
- "The Masvingo initiative is therefore not something
that will save this country from starvation," he said.
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- Earlier this month the MDC was denied permission to import
more than 100 tonnes of grain to feed starving Zimbabweans amid charges
by the government the food had been donated by Britain and was meant to
endear the opposition party to the rural electorate.
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- Since then the food aid has been detained at the Beitbridge
border with South Africa.
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- First Posted September 26, 2002 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/758058/posts?page=1
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