Rome  - Some 5.1 million people in Zimbabwe will face hunger by January 2009, unless the country's government and the international community begin emergency supplies of seeds and fertilizers, a UN report has warned.

Farmers in the southern African nation also needed urgent delivery of dipping chemicals for the control of tick-borne livestock disease, according to the report issued in Rome on Wednesday.

The document is based on the findings of a crop food assessment mission to Zimbabwe by two Rome-based UN agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

Zimbabwe's cereal availability for the 2008-2009 marketing year is estimated ad 848,000 tons - a 40 per cent decrease over the previous year, the report said.

The country's production of maize for 2008 is estimated at 575,000 tons, 28 per cent lower than 2007 and 44 per cent below the 2006 figure.

Adverse weather, untimely delivery of seeds, shortages of fertilizer, deteriorating infrastructure and "most importantly," unprofitable prices for most crops controlled by Zimbabwe's state monopoly Grain Marketing Board, were to blame for the situation, the report said.

But the UN mission to Zimbabwe also said that the decline in the country's agricultural production over the last seven to eight years was due to "structural change," a reference to President Robert Mugabe's controversial land re-distribution policies.

"The newly settled farmers cultivate only about half of the prime land allocated to them owing to shortages of tractor/draught power, fuel, and investment in infrastructure/improvements, and absenteeism on the part of some new settler beneficiaries," the report said.

"The large-scale commercial sector now produces less than one- tenth of the maize that it produced in the 1990s," it added.

Since 2000, the Zimbabwe government, in the name of addressing the injustices of the country's colonial legacy, has seized land from white, large-scale commercial farmers with the stated aim of handing it over to impoverished black communities.

Critics have condemned the policy as a "land-grab" by Mugabe, who they accuse of awarding confiscated land to his cronies and in exchange for political support. (dpa)