U.N. aid chief urges Zimbabwe to ease NGO clampdown

GENEVA (Reuters) - Two million Zimbabweans were directly affected by President Robert Mugabe's crackdown on aid groups ahead of last week's election that extended his long term in power, the United Nations top aid official said on Tuesday.

John Holmes, the U.N.'s under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, warned that another poor harvest in Zimbabwe stood to increase the numbers of people going hungry in the country that was once Africa's bread-basket.

"Our levels of concern about Zimbabwe are certainly very high," Holmes told a news briefing in Geneva, appealing to Harare to allow the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) the U.N. works with to resume deliveries of food and other aid.

"Two million people were directly affected by that, not least because of the suspension of food operations," he said.

"I very much hope that the government will relax again that ban on the operations of NGOs ... They are going to need a lot of food assistance from outside, and if the NGOs are suspended in the field that is a huge problem."

Mugabe, whose government ordered NGOs to stop work on June 4, has accused foreign aid agencies of using food as a weapon to try to remove him from power.

Holmes, a former British diplomat, said while the rising world price of food was compounding pressure in Zimbabwe, "it must be hard to detect it" given the country's hyper-inflation, which hit an official record of 164,900 percent in February.

Economists say the actual rate is around 2 million percent.

Other poor countries will need more international assistance because of the stark increases in the price of wheat and other food staples, said Holmes, who serves as coordinator of a U.N. task force on food insecurity.

The United Nations is planning to ask donor governments for more money in the coming weeks to help Afghanistan, Somalia and other countries combat malnutrition and other health problems linked to increasingly unaffordable food, he said.

(Reporting by Laura MacInnis; Editing by Richard Balmforth)