Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Wednesday January 29, 2003
Alistair Thomson

Once a breadbasket making up its neighbors' production shortfalls, Zimbabwe's commercial farming sector has been decimated by President Robert Mugabe's seizures of white-owned land for redistrubution to landless blacks, triggering an unprecedented economic and political crisis.

"Through the incredible generosity of donors, food has been put in place over the last several months in such a way that massive starvation and death has not occurred," said James Morris, United Nations humanitarian envoy for the region.

Around 15 million people in Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland are at risk of going hungry -- nearly half of them in Zimbabwe.

Winding up a tour of four of the region's countries suffering food shortages, Morris said there were already signs of an improvement in the food situation in Zambia and Malawi.

"I'm less optimistic in Zimbabwe of their ability to produce food," Morris told reporters in Johannesburg.

"There's just no question that the change in the makeup of the agricultural picture in Zimbabwe has affected everybody.

"They would claim they have planted more hectares of crops ... (but) the productivity of commercial farms is five, six or seven times what it is for a communal farm," he said.

Morris said Zimbabwe, which has suffered months of fuel and food shortages as the government struggles to find foreign exchange, should float food prices and allow private operators to import and distribute food.

"They need to import something approaching one million metric tons of food a year and they don't have the foreign exchange to do that. And if they don't allow the market to operate I don't know how they are going to do that," he said.

Morris said Zimbabwe's foreign relations were suffering because of concerns it was interfering with the distribution of humanitarian aid, though he was confident distribution of United Nations food aid was not being interfered with.

"There is still considerable concern...that there may be some political guidance in the distribution of the government's food. I raised this issue with President Mugabe," Morris said.

GRIM REAPER

Morris made his tour of southern Africa along with U.N. envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, who said the pandemic had combined with the food crisis to create what had been dubbed "new variant famine."

"The sense of destruction is positively surreal in this interlocking of AIDS and hunger. Death has become the fulcrum of society, everywhere it is evident," Lewis said.

"The image that comes to mind is of the Grim Reaper."

Lewis said the crisis was the start of the social collapse threatened by AIDS, which had claimed the lives of seven million of the region's farmers over the past 10 to 15 years.

"What happens when your education sector goes? What happens when your health sector goes?," he said.

"It feels like an overall societal collapse."

Lewis said the spread of AIDS and HIV, the virus which causes it, was being fueled by "predatory sexual male behavior" across Africa, including widespread sexual abuse within the family. "There is clearly in Africa a phenomenon of inter-generational sex ... (which) has in a significant measure been driving the epidemic," he said, calling for improved legal protection for women to help fight AIDS.

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