Food "monetization" aims to reach urban poor

Deliveries of food relief in Zimbabwe have almost exclusively focused on rural communities, bypassing the needs of the urban poor. Providing aid to towns is complicated by the difficulty of properly targeting the food-insecure, and the logistics of distribution, relief workers say. As a result, urban households in Zimbabwe have been largely left on their own to struggle with the impact of severe food shortages and spiralling black market prices. An initiative by the Consortium for the Southern Africa Food Emergency (C-SAFE), which still awaits funding, seeks to increase the access of poor urban households to affordable food supplies by using the market - rather than food handouts. C-SAFE, made up of the NGOs World Vision, CARE and Catholic Relief Services, is proposing a three-month pilot programme in Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo to sell 15,000 mt of US Agency for International Development (USAID)-supplied sorghum through small-scale traders. An added bonus is that profits from the sales would be ploughed back into development projects. Maize and wheat are Zimbabwe's staple foods, but their importation and domestic marketing is under the monopoly of the state-run Grain Marketing Board (GMB). Confronted by the country's food crisis, fuel shortages and administrative problems, GMB has been unable to come even close to meeting the demand, humanitarian officials say. In urban areas, price controls - the government's answer to rising prices - have further distorted the market, with basic commodities being re-directed onto the more expensive parallel market. But despite escalating prices - Zimbabwe's inflation rate last month jumped by 41 points to reach 269 percent - the lack of availability of maize and wheat remains a more significant problem. "We aim to target the poor by using a market mechanism. Sorghum [a less preferred commodity] is the [food] option to pre-select those desperate enough to buy," Steve Goudswaard, C-SAFE project manager in South Africa, told IRIN. Sorghum is more freely marketed than maize or wheat, although the government did impose a price freeze on the grain last year. C-SAFE would need to work with the Ministry of Commerce and local authorities to determine its price, Walter Middleton of World Vision explained. According to the C-SAFE proposal, with funding secured, imported sorghum would be milled and bagged in Zimbabwe. From there, supplies would be directed to street corner grocers as another tool for targeting poorer households. Credit facilities and an auction system for tender bids could be used creatively to help ensure the participation of small-scale traders. "This innovative and untested approach is inevitably risky. Assumptions about such things as the effectiveness of sorghum as a self-targeting commodity, the capacity/willingness of private sector agents to participate, and government cooperation/approval, all require testing," a project assessment report noted. "In addition, the availability of resources (particularly sorghum) that are currently available for this intervention are quite limited." Bulawayo was selected as the pilot city for the project because of consumer familiarity with sorghum, the acuteness of the food shortage in the drought-hit region and the available milling capacity. At the ration rate of 10 kilos per person per month, the planned importation of 15,000 mt of sorghum for Bulawayo would feed 500,000 people for three months, Middleton calculated. If successful, the scheme would be replicated in other cities, he added.