Read at :
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=94286
ZIMBABWE: One million need food assistance
After a thin harvest, Rudo Mangwere, 32, a farmer in Chirumhanzu district, some 200km southwest of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, has resorted to selling wild honey by the roadside to beat hunger. She is one of just over a million rural Zimbabweans who will struggle to feed themselves for the next four months.
A single mother with three school-going children, Mangwere’s poor harvest was partly the result of inadequate rainfall in her area during the 2010/11 farming season, but also because she has no access to draught animals – oxen or a horse – to pull a plough.
”Almost every family from my area is on the road[side] these days, selling honey, mazhanje (wild loquats) and firewood. We hardly harvested anything, and this is the only way we can keep our children from starving,” Mangwere told IRIN.
Like most households from her community in Midlands Province, she can no longer pay her children’s school fees and the family is surviving on wild fruits and one main meal in the evening, she said. Although food is readily available in the local shops, most of the villagers do not have the money to buy it.
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