HARARE: The weary Zimbabwean farmer had been accused of a lot of things in the past couple of years, but this one was new. After armed government men burst through his gates and hauled off the last of the maize he used to feed his livestock, one of them accused him of trying to starve the country’s black population.

With just seven weeks until the presidential election on March 9 and 10, President Robert Mugabe is all too aware that people will not vote for him on an empty stomach. The wholesale confiscation of the most productive farms has created a potentially catastrophic food shortage and in desperation the government is seizing animal feed and any other grain it can find.

This year’s harvest will be the second disastrous crop in a row. And the impact of that catastrophe will fall at precisely the moment when Zimbabwe goes to the polls. By then much of the country’s livestock will already have been slaughtered.

Many rural areas - notably parts of Matabeleland, Masvingo and Mashonaland - are already facing serious food shortages. In the cities, shops are bare of the cheaper basic maize, and supplies of the more expensive, refined variety are limited. Cooking oil has not been seen in many areas for weeks. The few stores that have milk, ration it.

The World Food Programme and regional organizations warn that 500,000 Zimbabweans already face serious food shortages which could lead to starvation within weeks, and that grain supplies are sufficient to feed millions more only for another two months. The government says it needs 150,000 tonnes of maize immediately and a further 200,000 tonnes by April. And it will need many hundreds of thousands of tonnes more if the land remains idle.

Zimbabwe’s neighbours are as concerned about the consequences of a food crisis as they are about the political violence. South Africa is preparing a military base near its northern border as a refugee camp in case tens of thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - flee what Pretoria describes as “meltdown”. That is taken to mean a number of potential disasters, from starvation to civil war.

The present food shortage was caused by the sharp fall in the maize harvest last year, initially because of poor rains but compounded by the farm occupations under Mugabe’s fast-track land redistribution plan. The 2001 harvest fell 40 per cent short of the more than two million tonnes of maize Zimbabwe consumes each year. This year promises to be even more serious, with the annual harvest in March and April expected to produce less than half the country’s needs, according to the government’s statistics. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.