Global Policy Forum

By Dina Kraft

The Zimbabwean government will have to abandon its grain monopoly and allow free trade in food if the starving nation hopes to feed itself again, the head of the World Food Program said Saturday.

The south African nation is experiencing a food crisis that threatens some 6.7 million people — more than half the population — with starvation. The situation in a nation once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa is blamed on drought and a collapse of agriculture after the government's confiscation of white-owned farms as part of its land-reform program.

The government has instituted stiff price controls and made it illegal for businesses to import or distribute grain. But those measures have only intensified the food crisis as businesses have little incentive to sell goods as long as food prices are fixed below world and regional market prices, WFP head James Morris said.

‘‘The free market needs to work ... where dealers are allowed to offer their supplies,'' Morris said during a tour of southern African nations as a U.N. special envoy.

He hunched over small children eating cornmeal and soy porridges at feeding stations Saturday outside Harare and despaired at the growing regional humanitarian crisis.

‘‘It's even more difficult today because of the context of what is happening (elsewhere) in Africa,'' he said, citing hunger to the north, in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and unrest in the west African nation of Ivory Coast.

‘'The demographics, the challenges, and the needs for the donor community to respond is unprecedented,'' he said. ‘‘How do we keep people alive?''

In Zimbabwe, where journalists have seen ruling party activists deny government grain to opposition members, Morris said he was confident that at least international aid was not being manipulated by political forces.

Morris said he had offered the Zimbabwean government assistance in monitoring food distribution in government and private businesses to make sure all who wanted food were able to buy it.

Stephen Lewis, the U.N.'s special envoy for AIDS in Africa, was accompanying Morris on the tour that includes Zimbabwe, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia. He urged the international community to pledge assistance to not only fighting hunger, but also to the AIDS pandemic, which was compounding the food crisis.

‘‘It's the deep sense of accelerated urgency as the conjunction of hunger and AIDS plays itself out,'' said Lewis. ‘‘When the body has no food to consume, the virus consumes the body ... people are dying sooner.''

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