Inflation rate in country reaches 231 million per cent a year

C3

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Some rural Zimbabweans facing one of the hungriest years they could remember have been forced to live on a meal a day and in some cases only on wild fruits, the UN food aid agency said yesterday.

Enlarge Photo

The Associated Press

World Food Programme supplies are distributed in Musita, Zimbabwe yesterday. The UN food aid agency found Zimbabweans reduced to eating wild fruits when it was finally able to reach the countryside after months of being blocked by the government.

The World Food Program appealed for donations to help fight hunger in Zimbabwe, straining as an economic collapse, years of food scarcity, AIDS and poor weather have combined to put it in a category all its own in a region where most countries are poor.

"Zimbabwe is the only one that is facing a national crisis," agency spokesman Richard Lee said.

The economic collapse, with inflation of at least 231 million per cent a year, has put seeds, fertilizer and farming equipment out of the reach of many Zimbabweans. AIDS has devastated the farming work force. Weather has been a factor, with either too much rain in some areas and too little in others.

Aid agencies had been blocked for months from doing their work by President Robert Mugabe's government. The ban was lifted in August, but it took weeks for agencies to start work again. In one of the first distributions since the ban was lifted, aid workers over the weekend handed out dried corn, vegetable oil and other aid.

In a video Lee shot of the aid distribution, villagers were shown painstakingly picking kernels off the ground after a handful of grain spilled. They were shown shaking off the dust and placing the food carefully in bags before hauling it home on their backs, in wheelbarrows, or on burros.

Lee said in an interview after returning to neighbouring South Africa that people told him they were experiencing one of the hungriest years they could remember.

"In previous years, we used to harvest a few bags of grain," Sabath Musiiwa, a 54-year-old caring for her tuberculosis-afflicted husband and four children, said in Lee's video. "But this year there is nothing."

Lee said the World Food Program found Zimbabweans getting by on one meal a day, of corn meal porridge and a few vegetables for the lucky, but only wild fruits for others.

The UN estimates 45 per cent of Zimbabwe's population, or 5.1 million people, will need food help by early 2009.