HARARE , 6 August 2007 (IRIN) -

Unreliable electricity supplies have wrought havoc on Zimbabwe's winter wheat crop, and the country, already unable to feed more than a quarter of its population, is set to record one of its worst harvests.

Earlier this year the national power utility, Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA), introduced daily 20-hour power cuts for domestic consumers, to give priority to the electricity requirements of irrigation farmers producing winter wheat.

However, farmers say crop production has failed because ZESA was unable to maintain a regular power supply to the farmers.

Rensen Gasela, a farmer in Midlands Province and former chief executive for cereals at the state-run Grain Marketing Board, told IRIN, "We have enough water in the dams but we do not have enough electricty supplies to irrigate the winter wheat, and many farmers have written off their winter crop, which was affected by moisture stress or inadquate water supply."

The winter wheat crop is expected to come in well below last year's poor harvest of 78,000 metric tonnes (mt), Gasela said.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) made an urgent US$118 million appeal last week to provide immediate assistance to 3.3 million of about 4.1 million Zimbabweans who will face severe food shortages from November to March 2008. The WFP had factored in a winter wheat production by Zimbabwe of about 128,000mt, but the harvest is expected to fall well short of those estimates.

Wilson Nyabonda, president of the Zimbabwe Indigenous Commercial Farmers Union, told The Sunday Mail, a government-owned newspaper, that new farmers had received all the government inputs ahead of schedule, only to be let down by erratic power supplies.

"For the first time, farmers received seed, fertiliser and chemicals well before May [the planting month]; most farmers accessed fuel as well, which they recieved without paying cash upfront," he told the newspaper.

He said farmers began to experience problems with their winter wheat crop when power supplies became unreliable. "This is where things fell apart, as electricty was only available in the first days of May. From there onwards it became a nightmare for farmers."

In Manicaland Province, the Agricultural Rural Development Authority (ARDA), the parastatal mandated to produce staple foods to ensure food security, also fell victim to inadequate water supplies because of ZESA's sporadic power supplies and hundred of hectares of wheat failed to germinate. ARDA's CEO, Joseph Matowanyika, was fired last month.

Vice-president Joyce Mujuru has embarked on a nationwide tour of ZESA's power plants to assess the country's ability to generate electricity.

Severe foreign currency shortages have made replacing outdated equipment at the country's thermal power stations unaffordable, and although Zimbabwe has large deposits of coal, it cannot be extracted because the lack of foreign currency has also made maintenance or replacement of mining equipment very difficult.

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