ZIMBABWE: Another year without much food

HARARE: Zimbabwe is bracing for another year of food insecurity, amid bleak expectations from both the main maize harvest in April and the coming winter wheat crop.

25 May 2009

The hunger season peaked in March, when about seven million people - more than half the population - relied on donated food. An assessment of the national crop by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will be published in the first half of June.

"It [the harvest] is going to be poor, we just don't know how poor," WFP's southern Africa spokesman, Richard Lee, told IRIN. Feeding operations have been wound down, but about 600,000 vulnerable people would still receive assistance.

Read the full article on IRIN.