By MacDonald Dzirutwe

HARARE, June 5 (Reuters) - More than a third of Zimbabweans will need food aid by early 2008 after a poor harvest this year, leading international aid organisations said on Tuesday.

A joint U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) report said crop failures in southern provinces and rising poverty would see about 2.1 million people facing serious food shortages by the third quarter of this year.

The number would grow to 4.1 million in the first three months of 2008, which is a third of Zimbabwe's estimated 12 million people.

The grim outlook comes at a time when Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is struggling to tame the world's highest inflation rate and ease political tensions in the southern African country once seen as the region's bread basket.

Zimbabwe has suffered food shortages since 2001, which critics blame on Mugabe's seizure of white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

Mugabe accuses the country's increasingly vocal opposition and Western powers of plotting to oust him.

Critics accuse Mugabe of mismanaging an economy that is sinking deeper into crisis, leaving four in five people without jobs and many unable to feed their families.

"While drought devastated crops in many areas, Zimbabwe's overall production was also hampered by insufficient fertilizer, fuel and tractors, and by the country's crumbling irrigation system," Henri Josserand, head of FAO's Global Information and Early Warning System, said in the statement.

The FAO and the WFP conducted a joint crop assessment in Zimbabwe between April and May this year which showed that low grain prices had also discouraged farmers from planting.

This resulted in a 6 percent drop in planted hectarage, putting the country's maize harvest at an estimated 799,000 tonnes and 126,000 tonnes for sorghum and millet, a 44 percent decline from 2006.

Zimbabwean agriculture officials were not immediately available for comment on the report.

But the government, which has not published its crop figures for 2007, has said it was importing food from its neighbours to plug the deficit.

Black farmers who benefited from the government's land reforms often complain that their operations were being hampered by lack of farming inputs such as seed, fertiliser and fuel.

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