In a weekly survey carried out on Friday, three major retail supermarkets along Nelson Mandela in the central business district (CBD) still did not have maize meal, the country’s staple food, in supply while sugar, cooking oil and bread could be found at one shop and unavailable at the next.
At OK Supermarket at the corner of First Street and Nelson Mandela, there was a long and winding queue of more than 200 people early on Friday morning, as consumers patiently waited to buy a 2 kilogramme packet of sugar selling at $6 200 each.
The queue snaked from the back entrance of the supermarket, dragged along the entire length of the supermarket along Nelson Mandela and turned into First Street.
Other hopeful consumers could be seen standing or sitting on the supermarket’s pavement, while others were crowded right at the front of the queue that led into the supermarket’s warehouse, patiently waiting for a chance to sneak into the
queue.
Right at the front a man in a green shirt was trying to marshal a semblance of order into the queue, allowing only one person at a time into the back entrance.
Inside, consumers were allowed to purchase only two packets of the commodity so that the rest of the other people standing in the queue could get the product.
One of the guards at the entrance of the supermarket said it had been the same scenario on Saturday with a long queue for sugar being the order of the day.
Yesterday it was still the same, with about the same number of people waiting with patient, glum and long suffering expressions that now aptly capture the faces of the greater part of this country’s populace.
Less than 100 metres away, still along Nelson Mandela, there was a shorter queue inside TM supermarket, and this
time consumers were waiting for yet another commodity – bread.
About 40 people made up the queue that snaked in the passage between two shelves yesterday and it had been the same the previous Friday.
In the city centre, the majority of the working population go for teatime between 10 and 12, a very good explanation why the queue is usually long inside the supermarket during that time.
“It now takes more time to buy a loaf of bread in the city centre these days than before.
“Each time you go into a supermarket to buy bread you find that it is not available so you walk on to the next supermarket where you won’t find it. Its better to just wait here,” one consumer said.
It has not always been like this, at least in the past two years, but the shortage of basic commodities on the formal market and their sudden reappearance on the black market at inflated prices re-ignites unwelcome memories of the 2003 shortages.
In that year, the country was confronted by perhaps its biggest challenges ever when virtually everything, from fuel, foreign currency, basic commodities and cash ran out completely.
The shortage of foreign currency required to purchase raw materials and inputs led to low capacity utilisation resulting in less output meaning that demand became much higher than
supply.
The launch of a new monetary policy by the central bank in late 2003 brought tight regulation to the economy and placed emphasis on reviving the productive sectors of the economy, something that saw the shortages of basic commodities vanishing while prices
stabilised.
But following the March 31 polls this year, the shortages of basic commodities re-emerged and as a result food queues are now being witnessed with alarming
 frequency.
The shortages persisted in the entire month of April and two weeks into May, and nearly two months later, not much has changed.
The government’s verdict on the shortages has been clear and predictable; the shortages are a result of sabotage by the business community disappointed by the victory of the ruling party over the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
But the business community has been providing a more detailed response, blaming the shortages on economic fundamentals that have gone awry.
According to economic analysts and the business leaders themselves, the manufacturing and productive sector of the economy is operating at less than 30 percent due to acute foreign currency problems.
Secondly that the country’s exchange rate, at $6 200 to the greenback, is grossly undervalued and fails to compensate for high production, labour and import
costs.
With production falling and exporters failing to be adequately remit their foreign currency, the production of most basic commodities has plummeted resulting in the shortages.
This has seriously undermined local producers of basic commodities and as a result some of the supermarkets are even resorting to importing products such as cooking oil for salelocally.
For instance at TM, a 750 bottle of pure vegetable oil, manufactured by South African-based Epic Foods was selling at $19 700, with no local products in sight.

Commodity       OK           TM         FCG
Cooking Oil          -      $19 700       -
Sugar             $6 200           -         -
Bread                   -     $3 500     $3 500
Maize meal           -         -          -
Milk                      -         -          -
Meat             $49 500   $36 500  $55 500