Workers Face Starvation

12^th September 2002

MORE than 150,000 farm workers who lost their jobs last month when the government ordered hundreds of white farmers to stop farming now face starvation as they have only about three weeks of food supplies left, according to a survey by the privately-run Zimbabwe Community Development Trust (ZCDT).

The ZCDT is a Harare-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) which provides shelter and food mostly to the former farm workers, as well as to people displaced by political violence.

Anglican church priest and ZCDT executive director Tim Neill this week said the survey on the plight of farm workers had been conducted last month on 3,200 white-owned farms across Zimbabwe.

Since last month the government has stepped up pressure on 2,900 white farmers to leave their properties after the expiry of its eviction notices on August 8th.

About 300 farmers have been arrested in the past few weeks for refusing to obey the government's evictions, while others have complied with it. But many are refusing to quit their farms to make way for landless blacks, most of them government followers.

Farming operations have nonetheless stopped at nearly all the country's commercial farms after most farmers escaped to the safety of urban areas, leaving their workers stranded on the farms with no work or money to buy food.

Neill said: "Half the number of farm workers had food to last them only for less than three months since the August 8th deadline, and this means that between the end of September and mid-October there will be a new group of people facing starvation."

There are a total 350,000 farm workers, each of whom on average supports about five dependants.

Neill said President Robert Mugabe's home province of Mashonaland West, which in the past has witnessed some of the worst violence on commercial farms, had the highest number or about a third of the farm workers threatened with hunger.

The government has promised to resettle the farm workers, together with landless villagers, under its controversial land reforms but to date only about one percent of the farm hands have been resettled. Most of these are Mugabe's supporters.

Niell said some of the farm workers had fled hunger on the farms and gone into Harare and other cities, where NGOs were helping them with food and shelter.

But several thousands more were still on the farms, surviving on the little food reserves they were left with when the farmers fled or on the meagre retrenchment packages they had been paid.

He said his organisation had been overstretched beyond its means and that it was now finding it difficult to continue providing food to the displaced workers.

"We are only capable of providing food to 400 families and this is a short-term solution which does not offer them a breakpoint and neither does it provide a movement towards a developmental approach," Neill said.

Six million other Zimbabweans need emergency food aid from international donors or they could starve to death after poor rains last season and the government's disruptive land reforms cut food production by more than 60 percent.

Neill said his agency was appealing to donors for funds to buy seed packs for the farm workers so they could grow crops this season.

But he said the ZCDT's work was being hampered by state security agents, who in the past have arrested the organisation's officials on allegations that they were training "terrorists" at the shelter camps they run for displaced Zimbabweans.

By Zhean Gwaze - Financial Gazette (Zim)