HARARE, 16 October 2009 (IRIN) – The planting season in Zimbabwe is fast approaching, but farmers are struggling to access crucial agricultural inputs, bringing fears of yet another poor harvest.
“Before the government of national unity came into being [in February 2009] … new farmers would receive fuel, fertilizer, seed and implements at almost giveaway prices, and sometimes for free,” said Thomas Chirandu, a large-scale farmer in Mashonaland West Province who had prepared his land but could not afford to buy maize seed and fertilizer.
Chirandu, a beneficiary of Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform programme, said that without “urgent assistance” from the government, most newly settled commercial farmers would not be able to grow food for the country.
President Robert Mugabe launched the fast-track land reform programme in 2000 to redistribute white-owned commercial farms to landless blacks; instead it brought steep economic decline, disastrous food shortages and political violence, with widespread allegations that the redistribution process was a smokescreen for land grabs by members of Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF elite.
“We are being left to fend for ourselves, and if there is no urgent and immediate rescue package, there could be even more serious food shortages next year,” Chirandu warned. In 2008 and part of 2009 more than half of Zimbabwe’s estimated 11 million people were receiving food aid.
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