News stories by Ignatius Banda, page 5

BULAWAYO, Mar 27 (IPS) - "I have never planted a tree in my life," laughs Jairos Saunyama, a tobacco farmer, revelling at the absurdity of the question of whether he is involved in the country's afforestation efforts. Sawunyama is one of thousands of farmers who are blamed by local conservationists for turning the country's forests into deserts and dust bowls.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Mar 10 (IPS) - Young women in Zimbabwe are becoming increasingly vulnerable to sex trafficking because of the country's economic climate and because of the lack of enforcement of international legal instruments.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 18 (IPS) - Zimbabwe is making fresh commitments to open up its airwaves with government promising to issue licences to private television and community radio stations before the end of the year.

BULAWAYO, Feb 06 (IPS) - Nearly half of Zimbabwe's population -- some 8 million people -- face food insecurity. Yet in food and vegetable markets across the country wastage is high as piles of once-nutritious vegetables rot.

Piles and piles of rotting vegetables at food markets situated right in Zimbabwe's central business district would elsewhere be viewed as a sign of plenty.

But the Southern African nation has not been spared the irony of food wastage at a time of food shortages.

BULAWAYO, May 29 (IPS) - Zimbabwe goes to the polls in July for the first general election since the departure of Robert Mugabe, and the jockeying over who will represent the country's major political parties is in full throttle.

BULAWAYO, Mar 26 (IPS) - With Zimbabwe's new President Emmerson Mnangagwa just concluding a 100-day timeline to address what he considered the country's most pressing issues, which focused on economic revival, human rights activists have their own timeline.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 23 (IPS) - Sijabuliso Nleya has been kept busy in the past few weeks digging up sand. He is not a sand poacher like scores of people who local district councils across the country say are digging along dry river beds for sand used in the construction of houses. "The situation is terrible," said Nleya, who owns a plot in Douglasdale, a small farming community on the outskirts of Bulawayo.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jan 12 (IPS) - Mildren Ndlovu* knows the mental toll of Zimbabwe's long-drawn economic hardships in a country where a long rehashed statistic by labour unions puts unemployment at 90 per cent.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Dec 15 (IPS) - Successive poor harvests have diminished Ndodana Makhalima's household food stocks and the family's nutrition status.

A subsistence farmer in Lupane, about 110 kilometres north of Zimbabwe's second city, Bulawayo, 56 year-old Makhalima has learnt to live with hunger on his door step.


BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE, Nov 03 (IPS) - Zimbabwe's planned Batoka Gorge power project on the Zambezi River is expected to generate 2,400 megawatts (MW) of electricity, upward from an initial 1,600 MW, but the worsening power cuts that are being blamed on low water levels have renewed concerns about the effects of climate change on mega dams.