Posted on 01/03/2003 5:25:17 PM PST by MadIvan
Robert Mugabe is refusing to let Zimbabweans import food, a decision which is condemning millions of people to shortages, United Nations officials said yesterday.
More than 5,000 people gathered at Viriri School, Murambinda, 140 miles south of Harare, to collect hand-outs of corn, beans and oil from the World Food Programme.
Patience Mukondomi, 31, was not given any. As a teacher she has a job and therefore does not qualify for aid. "There is nothing in the shops. We have money, but there is no food to buy, please sell us some," she implored officials.
But Luis Clemens, a WFP spokesman, explained that doing so would be against the rules. "We cannot sell food, however much we want to help people," he said.
"We would be able to feed many more people if the government allowed private importation of corn."
The Mugabe regime has awarded a monopoly on trading in grain to a government agency and there are countless verified reports from opposition supporters that they have been denied permission to buy this food.
At the WFP distribution centre another desperate woman, with a baby on her back, said her husband was in the army 40 miles further south and so she too did not qualify for food aid.
"We are starving," she said. "Even if my husband sent money, which he doesn't because I am the second wife, there is no food to buy. My neighbour helps me. Without her we would be dead."
The neighbour is one of three million people receiving food from WFP, half of those on the brink of starvation. Mugabe undertook to feed the rest, but has been unable to find foreign currency to import anything but a trickle of grain from South Africa.
"Private importation of corn would change the situation dramatically," said Mr Clemens. "We have made the offer to facilitate the importation of food, but there is no change in policy."
He said the WFP would need to continue its Zimbabwe operations beyond April, when harvests are due.
Few crops have been planted by the inexperienced farmers who replaced more than 4,000 white commercial farmers evicted in the past three years under the government's land reforms.
Teresa Madamombe, 41 a mother of five, said: "This is the first time in our lives there is no food to buy. In 1983 and in 1992 there was drought, but we could buy food, but not now, and I do not know why."
She said she knew nothing of the destruction of Zimbabwe's commercial agriculture. "We do not get news here. We are far from the commercial farms. Have they all gone?"
A thin young man overheard the conversation, sidled up and whispered: "There is no food because of politics. You must know that. Industries which make food have closed down now that the farmers have gone.
"We can't talk politics because there has been violence here, but we do know why we have no food."
Not being a resident is no bar.
That is not a defense of your own blatant racist commens.
Carolyn
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