Politics of food in Zimbabwe

It's a battle of wits. Zimbabwe says it now has enough food. It does not need assistance any longer. Donors say this is a lie. The country does not have enough food. President Robert Mugabe, they say, just wants to get rid of donors so that he can use food as a political tool to win next year's general elections.

Some media reports have even suggested that the elections, which President Mugabe has announced will be held in March, have been pushed forward to October so that they can be held before the country runs out of food.

What is apparently clear, but neither side wants to admit, is that the debate is not really about food. It is about land.

If Zimbabwe has enough food, this means that its controversial land reform programme has succeeded. This would be a plus for Mugabe. The West, which has opposed the land reform programme, as well as donors who refused to fund it, will not swallow this. They claim it is a "fantasy".

Agriculture Minister Joseph Made said in a statement on May 11 that the country had produced 2 431 182 tonnes of maize in the season just ended. Together with sorghum and millet, this should come to 2 805 995 tonnes. This is more than the country consumes.

According to the United States Agency for International Development-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS), Zimbabwe requires 1 674 265 tonnes of maize for both human and livestock consumption. It also requires 176 562 tonnes of millet, 341 353 tonnes of wheat and 11 653 tonnes of rice, making a total of 2 203 833 tonnes of grain.

Made said new farmers had produced 15 times what they produced last season. Social Welfare Minister Paul Mangwana said since the country had produced enough food, it no longer required food aid.

But Mangwana said the government still required assistance for agricultural recovery and social programmes such as the rehabilitation of boreholes and other farming infrastructure. He said aid agencies like the World Food Programme, which spearheaded the food relief programme, could continue to provide assistance to vulnerable groups like AIDS orphans and the elderly.

"They will continue offering assistance, but this will be to targetted groups only, not to communities on a larger scale as before," he said.

Donors and the West, it appears, will not hear this. They have opposed the land reform programme since 1997 claiming it was a recipe for disaster. And when the country ran out of food following the 2002 drought, they seemed to have been proved right. The country had been reduced from a bread basket to a basket case. As far as they are concerned, therefore, there is no way Zimbabwe can turnaround on its own without external help.

In a press release on May 14, Amnesty International said assessment by independent organisations had revealed that Zimbabwe was likely to have a cereal deficit of between 500 000 and 800 000 tonnes.

"If independent assessments are correct," Amnesty argued, "the risk is that food will be used for political ends and food supplies will go first and only to supporters of the ruling party."

Amnesty International said it was gravely concerned that the present actions of the government of Zimbabwe, to bar donor agencies from continuing to provide food aid to an estimated "five million people", may be an attempt to control food supplies ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for March 2005.

"Political manipulation of food, particularly state-controlled GMB grain, by officials and supporters of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) has been widely reported over the past two years. ZANU-PF has repeatedly used food as an electioneering tool. Viewed against a history of political manipulation of food the government's current actions are a cause for grave concern," it said.

But the latest available report from FEWS says Zimbabwe is capable of meeting its own food requirements without any outside assistance even if there were a deficit.

"Two grain availability scenarios can be developed for the 2004/05 marketing year, depending on the yield assumptions made," it says. "In both cases, a deficit is projected. The worst case scenario, given total grain production of 1 491 000 tonnes, results in a deficit of around 509 000 tonnes; in the best case scenario, with 1 930 000 tonnes of cereal production, a 70 000 tonnes deficit is projected."

More critical is FEWS' conclusion. "Based on the government's record over the past three years, and provided the foreign currency earnings situation remains at least the same as it was in 2001/02, it appears likely that the government will manage to import adequate amounts to close even the worst case scenario grain gap," it says.

Zimbabwe's foreign currency scenario is better than it was in 2001 and 2002. Central Bank governor Gideon Gono said foreign currency inflows in the first three months of this year alone were greater than those for the whole of last year.

The argument by the West and donors that Zimbabwe cannot be food self-sufficient is probably based on a wrong forecast by Agriculture Minister Joseph Made in 2001 when he insisted that the country had enough food, only to see it go begging. The argument is that if he got his figures wrong then, why believe him now?

Made, co-opted into Mugabe's government in 2000 as one of the young technocrats, survived that blunder because he stood his ground that he would go ahead with the land reform programme because he genuinely believed it would benefit the nation in the end.

What most people were probably not aware of, and may still not be aware of, is that Made has always been a strong advocate of small-scale producers. He believes that they are the answer to Africa's, and not just Zimbabwe's, agrarian success.

In a paper he prepared while still with the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority, Made argued that smallholder agriculture played an essential role in ensuring food security, economic growth and employment creation.

Financing these smallholder farmers was, therefore, crucial in poverty reduction in developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa. "There is ample evidence to show that smallholder farmers use land and other inputs just as efficiently as large-scale farmers,' he argued. "This justifies the need to finance and invest in the smallholder sector"

The West and donors have argued that Zimbabwe is in a mess because it grabbed land from mainly white large-scale farmers, but statistical evidence shows that peasant farmers produced 70 percent of the maize crop before the land reform programme.

Made argued that most of the aid to smallholder farmers had been through multilateral and bilateral aid agreements signed by recipient governments and aid agencies. Through this aid, farmers had benefitted from large investments in dam construction, irrigation facilities, machinery and other equipment. They had also benefitted from the transfer of technology, management and organisational skills.

But he pointed out that the problem with donor aid was that the granting of loans depended on macro-economic policies of the recipient country such as a stable political and social environment. "The moment these conditions are perceived by the aid agencies to be lacking, the aid is either suspended or withdrawn, regardless of whether the programmes have been completed or not."

This is exactly what has happened in Zimbabwe. Donors have abandoned the country because of the perceived "breakdown of the rule of law".

But because of his conviction that smallholder farmers can make it, Made is focusing on local investment into farming. The government is encouraging contract farming which enables farmers to get inputs from companies that will buy their produce.

While Zimbabwe says it needs infrastructural assistance none of the donors is talking about this because this will enable resettled farmers to become self-sufficient. They will not need food aid. This is bad business for the donors because while providing food relief to "starving" Zimbabweans they are also supporting agriculture in their home countries.

The politics of food aside, and even if Made's forecast is wrong again, Zimbabwe has another reason to be cautious. Every major drought, after independence, has been accompanied by a major scandal.

Sampson Paweni milked the government of $5 million during the massively funded drought relief programme following the 1982 drought. This remains one of the biggest scandals in Zimbabwe's history because the Zimbabwe dollar was stronger than the United States dollar at the time. The amount translates to about $60 billion today.

In 1992, when the country faced one of the worst droughts in history, Zimbabwe was forced to import 350 000 tonnes of yellow maize worth a staggering US$250 million which it did not need.

Though commercial farmers and the Grain Marketing Board had said there was no longer any need for food aid because the country was going to have a good harvest - just like the present case- Zimbabwe was forced by the World Bank to import the maize because "the deal was too advanced" to be stopped.

The country ended up with 469 000 tonnes of yellow maize which it did not know what to do with. It had to sell 317 000 tonnes as stockfeed to local farmers and milling companies and re-exported 102 000 tonnes to the Middle East at a loss. It also had to burn another 50 000 tonnes because it was not suitable even for animal consumption.

An audit of the current drought relief programme has not yet been carried out since the programme has not yet been completed. But, already, Chinhoyi businessman Cecil Muderede has been arrested for externalising more than US$1.3 million and R700 000 as well as defrauding the Grain Marketing Board of $63.7 million.

According to a report in the British newspaper, The Guardian, in January some of Britain's leading international charities which tried to help southern Africa avoid a food crisis in 2002-03 "overstated the seriousness of the situation to the public, failed to consult the people they were trying to help and did not listen to people's needs".

The report said "two British Red Cross appeals for money for Zimbabwe used the word famine and were particularly misleading. '[The British Red Cross] knew there were no starving millions in Zimbabwe'".

"One of the reasons given for so much aid going to Zimbabwe was that the British government was "very willing" to fund charities there," the report said.

Ironically, the same paper, seemed to be contradicting this report in a story by its southern African correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, two weeks ago. " In the year since I was forced to leave the country, the situation in Zimbabwe has worsened in every respect," Meldrum wrote. "More people are going hungry, with nearly two-thirds of the population reliant upon international food aid in recent months."

While the West and donors continue to be blinded by the previous positions, one cannot completely rule out that the ruling ZANU-PF might use food as a political weapon. The forthcoming general elections are critical for the party as it aims to secure a two-thirds majority and thus pave the way for a noble exit for Mugabe.

© Insider Publications 2004. This story is available for syndication. Contact the publisher at insider@ecoweb.co.zw or charlesrukuni@yahoo.com