Food aid working

Food aid interventions by development agencies in Zimbabwe's hungriest regions have had a positive impact on local communities, aid workers told IRIN on Tuesday.

Robert Heywood of Christian Aid said anecdotal evidence indicated that school feeding programmes had resulted in higher attendance, alert pupils, and less fainting in class by hungry children.

Christian Aid, through its local implementing partners, provides supplementary feeding to 167 schools in Matabeleland and Masvingo. In three districts of Manicaland in the east of the country, the agency is providing under-fives with fortified porridge. The programmes have been under way since September to stave off the effects of drought and flooding that ruined last year's harvest in much of the country.

Heywood, who arrived in Harare from Matabeleland on Tuesday, told IRIN: "The children are thankful for this food. Even some from the better off households, of which there are not many, are tucking into it."

Save the Children Fund (SCF) is feeding 60,000 vulnerable people in the traditionally food-deficit Zambezi valley. A mid-December SCF nutrition assessment found that acute malnutrition in the northwestern town of Binga was "unseasonably low" as a result of the agency's food intervention, programme director Chris McIvor said.

Whereas last year a survey found that poor households were being forced to sell their assets as a desperate measure in the face of food insecurity, new evidence pointed to the stabilisation of livestock prices and larger plantings, he told IRIN.

The food aid programmes in rural Zimbabwe, funded by the British government's development arm DFID and implemented with the assistance of the local authorities, are due to end in March to coincide with the new harvest. However, there are indications that there may again be problems with this season's crop in parts of the country due to low rainfall.

In the Zambezi valley, some farmers who planted early in October/November saw their initial crop whither in the field. "Unless we get rains very quickly, they are going to lose the rest", McIvor said. "People don't have the financial resources to replant." He predicted that SCF could well be involved in an extended feeding programme in 2002.

People across Zimbabwe are already faced with shortages of the staple mealie meal. "The shelves are bare. Some intermittent supplies are coming, in but they are not sufficient and when they arrive they are almost immediately bought up," McIvor said.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has purchased about 5,200 mt of maize meal from suppliers in South Africa for distribution in February. WFP launched an appeal in December for US $60 million for food aid to feed 558,000 rural Zimbabweans considered to be at risk of hunger and starvation due to the impact on last year's harvest of bad weather, and the economic downturn.

Development organisations are also concerned with the plight of the vulnerable urban poor, who are not yet covered by WFP's distribution plans. Latest figures put inflation at 112 percent, "but inflation on food is much higher than that. Prices are zooming up," Heywood explained.

The government has responded by promising new price controls, the state-controlled Herald newspaper reported on Tuesday. The Minister of Industry and International Trade, Herbert Murerwa said at the weekend that his Price Monitoring and Surveillance Unit was "analysing production costs for baby foods, stock-feed inputs, fencing material, sanitary ware, tyres, haulage tariffs, drugs and packaging with a view to coming up with statutory instruments for gazetting".

Goods which are already under price controls are bread, maize meal, wheat flour, beef, pork, chicken, cooking oil, sugar, margarine, soap, salt, seeds, fertiliser, cement, stock-feed, agro-chemical prices and bricks. Since the introduction of price controls last October, a black market has blossomed, the Herald acknowledged. Manufacturers and economists have been critical of the government's measures.