Some farm­ers in Zim­babwe they have to get on their hands and knees to dig the seeds into the earth. It’s either doing that back­break­ing work or starve.

The peak hunger sea­son is about to begin in Zim­babwe. An esti­mated 1.9 mil­lion will need food assis­tance from some­where after the har­vest runs out.

From IRIN, we read more about the hard­ship of farm­ing with­out tools.

Poor farm­ers in the dusty vil­lage of Man­dam­abwe, in Masvingo Province, southeastern Zim­babwe, have resorted to a ground­break­ing activ­ity to sal­vage what they can of their 2010 harvest.

“We call it chera udye [dig or starve], mean­ing one must dig the sun-hardened earth with bare hands and then plant the lim­ited seed avail­able. If you fail to do that you will die of hunger,” said Eve­lyn Imbayago, 44, a mother of four.

Every day, on her way to tend­ing a tiny plot of ger­mi­nat­ing ground­nut plants, she walks past a large por­tion of her land that lies fal­low. This year she had no fer­til­izer and only a small amount of seed; there are no oxen to pull the plough. So, to make what she does have count, she has dug a shal­low hole with a hoe for each seed, she told IRIN.

Lack of draught-power and essen­tial inputs are com­mon prob­lems in the drought-prone region, and this year’s grow­ing sea­son promises to be a test­ing one for most farm­ers in the area.

Sauros Debwe, 52, who also farms in Man­dam­abwe, told IRIN that the farm­ers who had oxen now demanded as much as US$25 to till a sin­gle acre (0.4 hectare), which was unaffordable.

“In the past we could pay those who had ani­mals for draught-power in kind, but this time there has not been much in the gra­naries — we had to depend on grain assis­tance pro­vided by [donors] to sur­vive. Now there is noth­ing to spare and exchange for tilling.”

Debwe said most farm­ers could not afford to wait until assis­tance arrived, and had been dig­ging small plant­ing holes in antic­i­pa­tion of the first rains.

Expect a rough season

This year Imbayago decided to switch from maize, the tra­di­tional sta­ple, to ground­nuts, which thrive in the sandy soil, even with­out chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers. “I can sell the ground­nuts or make peanut but­ter for sale, then use the money to buy mealie-meal [maize-meal],” she said.

She has not received any assis­tance this year. “Our tra­di­tional donors have not been forth­com­ing, while gov­ern­ment has also failed to assist since the rains started falling. I really don’t know how I will cope.”

Last sea­son, when most sub­sis­tence farm­ers strug­gled to feed their fam­i­lies and aid agen­cies had to step in with food assis­tance, she received sup­port from Care Inter­na­tional, a human­i­tar­ian aid orga­ni­za­tion work­ing to enhance food secu­rity and alle­vi­ate poverty in the area. The seeds and fer­til­izer they gave her got her and her fam­ily through the year.

After months of pro­cras­ti­na­tion, the Zim­babwe gov­ern­ment announced a new input sub­sidy scheme in Novem­ber. Accord­ing to the state-run Her­ald news­pa­per, the ini­tia­tive would make seed avail­able at a highly reduced price of US$1 per kilo­gram of maize or sorghum seed, and US$7 for a 50kg bag of fer­til­izer through the Grain Mar­ket­ing Board (GMB), a paras­tatal monopoly.

“We don’t know whether that will help,” said Kainos Muponda, the Man­dam­abwe vil­lage head. “Not many of us have that kind of money. More­over, one has to travel to Masvingo town, where the GMB depot is, incur­ring addi­tional costs in fares and carriage.”

The UN Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs (OCHA) has esti­mated that some 1.9 mil­lion Zim­bab­weans will need food assis­tance dur­ing the peak hunger sea­son from Jan­u­ary to March 2010.

OCHA launched an inter­na­tional appeal on 7 Decem­ber 2009 for US$378 mil­lion to buy food and med­i­cines, and bol­ster health, edu­ca­tion and san­i­ta­tion in the eco­nom­i­cally crip­pled country.

Like

Unlike