Tabitha Mutenga, Staff Reporter
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has pledged to take urgent steps to ensure food security in Zimbabwe, saying agriculture - blighted by a political fall-out between his party and that of President Robert Mugabe - remained the mainstay of the country's economy.
Speaking at a recent AgriBusiness Forum in South Africa, Tsvangirai said besides politics, lack of access to loans and a liquidity crunch on the domestic market remained significant threats to the sector.
"This means food security continues to be threatened and as government, we have to take urgent steps to ensure that there is food security in the country," Tsvangirai said.
The Prime Minister said food security in Zimbabwe remained a critical issue, with rates for chronic and acute child malnutrition still standing at 35 percent and 2,4 percent respectively.
He blamed the controversial land reform programme for increasing food insecurity in the country.
"Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of southern Africa until a wanton destruction of agricultural infrastructure when some political actors bastardised a noble land redistribution programme into a chaotic enterprise."
"The country was a reliable exporter of food to neighbouring countries. But the advent of the chaotic and violent land invasions decimated the sector and caused loss of confidence in agriculture as an industry," he said.
He acknowledged the necessity of the land redistribution programme in addressing historical land imbalances in the country but said the programme became an avenue "for avarice, looting and aggrandisement as chefs and the politically-connected grabbed farms for themselves, leaving former farm workers destitute and ordinary Zimbabweans crowded out of this national process".
Zimbabwe had become a basket case and government was faced with the burden of adequately funding the sector and ensuring maximum utilisation of the land.
"It is also imperative that we address toxic politics by averting violence in the farming and rural areas, stopping new land invasions and instead concentrate on how best we can ensure productivity by our new farmers."
"Property rights and title deeds must underpin the agrarian reform and therefore the constitution must recognise land and its ownership as a basic ground norm, which will be consistent with international conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and People's Rights," Tsvangirai said.
These basic rights and norms in respect to title rights in agriculture have been consistently and violently violated over the past decade, he said.
He called on the de-politicisation of the distribution of land, which he said must not be subject to the whims of an executive driven by political concerns.
"We cannot have a progressive society by creating more peasants, without security of tenure on their land and without the relevant infrastructure to engage in meaningful agriculture that averts food insecurity," Tsvangirai added.
To resuscitate the decimated agriculture sector, the political agreement demands a comprehensive, transparent and non-partisan land audit, during the tenure of the current Parliament, for the purpose of establishing accountability and eliminating multiple farm ownerships.
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