U.N. says 5 million risk hunger in Zimbabwe

By Stephen Brown

ROME (Reuters) - More than 5 million people in Zimbabwe risk going hungry by early next year as grain output tumbles due to bad weather, lack of seeds and fertilizer, fuel costs and poor grain prices for farmers, says a U.N. report.

The food agency report released on Wednesday urged the government of Zimbabwe and international community to ensure emergency aid to farms to tackle chronic shortages that could affect 5.1 million people in the country by January next year.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme estimated 2.04 million Zimbabweans risked hunger in coming months, "peaking at about 5.1 million at the height of the hungry season between January and March 2009".

The report saw maize output in 2008 falling 28 percent from last year to 575,000 tonnes and domestic cereal supply down 40 percent at 848,000 tonnes.

It said a major factor was unprofitable prices for crops controlled by the government's grain Marketing Board and called for trading to be opened up to private traders "to ensure that cereals can be imported and moved quickly to areas of need".

Zimbabwe has been grappling with food shortages since 2001 and has the world's highest inflation at 165,000 percent. But its 84-year-old leader Robert Mugabe blames Western sanctions for this economic collapse.

The United Nations has accused Harare of putting people at risk of increased suffering by banning independent foreign aid groups trying to deal with the food shortage and economic crisis that has driven millions of Zimbabweans abroad to seek work.

Mugabe, Zimbabwe's ruler since independence in 1980, accuses international aid groups of campaigning for the opposition in the June 27 presidential run-off against Morgan Tsvangirai, who won a first-round vote in March.

Mugabe recently conceded that his program of seizing farms from whites had resulted in under-utilization of farmland which once made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of southern Africa.

The new U.N. report said this was behind "structural change" leading to falling production over the past 7-8 years.

"The newly settled farmers cultivate only about half of the prime land allocated to them," it said, blaming fuel shortages for tractors, under-investment in infrastructure and technology and "absenteeism on the part of some new settler beneficiaries".

"The large-scale commercial sector now produces less than one tenth of the maize that it produced in the 1990s," it said.

The U.N. mission put Zimbabwe's cereal import needs at 1.232 million tonnes and estimated that there was an uncovered cereal import deficit of about 380,000 tonnes of maize.

(Editing by Peter Blackburn)