Mugabe, Zimbabwe, and African famine.

This just breaks my heart. There's no logical, moral, or rational reason why famine should exist.

I am posting a small part of this very long article. You can click on the link to read all of it. It is spread over 4 pages:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1378517,00.html

It used to be described as the bread basket of southern Africa, with neat fields of maize and soya growing in rich red soil and farmers notching up world records for yields. Rows of giant greenhouses sheltered roses that earned important foreign exchange, as did fields of miniature vegetables to sell in British supermarkets.

In 10 years of visiting Zimbabwe, I have often been through Mazowe and its model farmland. Today it is a series of fallow fields, overgrown with grass, weeds and thorny scrub, as if some deadly scourge had swept through the valley. There are orchards of dead citrus trees, greenhouse frames stripped of their plastic roofs and the broken, twisted poles of what were once floodlights and irrigation systems.

With parliamentary elections due in March, the programme has been accelerated. Of 4,500 white farmers, only 300 remain on farms. More than 600,000 farm workers and their families have lost their livelihood. “There will be no farmers left by the elections,” said Worsley-Worsick, whose office walls are covered with land eviction notices.

A rose farmer whose wife pleaded that he not be identified gave a running commentary as we drove. “This was Foyle farm, the biggest dairy farm in the country, now Grace Mugabe’s. This was Wally Barton’s farm — beautiful farm, maize, soya beans, nothing grown the last three years since he went to Canada. This was Norman Kinnaird — he held the world record for cotton. This was Old Man Bailey — he had a ballroom upstairs, now Jonathan Moyo’s. That was the top cattle chap Angus Black — his old man walked into the dam after their farm was seized. And that was our old family farm — in 50 years we never missed a season.”

What we should see at this time of year are fields of maize about 1ft high and tractors fertilising the land. But nobody has planted. The few settlers left have been provided with no seed or equipment. Cultivation is restricted to a few subsistence plots, an odd sight on huge farms that averaged 2,500 acres.

On one we watched two men leading a pair of donkeys pulling a plough round and round in small circles. According to Jag figures, food production has dropped by as much as 90% since the farm seizures began in 2000.

At the silos of the Grain Marketing Board in Concession, a few years ago one would have seen long lines of trucks delivering maize from the surrounding farms. Instead there was just one truck of wheat and a line of women showing party cards to get food. An official admitted that the only maize available had been imported from South Africa.

More than 2,000 of the farmers driven off have already moved overseas. About half have started new lives in Australia, New Zealand and Britain; and half have gone to neighbouring countries such as Zambia and Mozambique.

has ignored this for years. Think Saddam was the worst guy out there? Think again. I've been following this in The Economist. Mugabe's responsible for more pain and suffering than Saddam and the Sudanese government put together.

in the U.S.A. Nor will or does the news media which turns on commercial profit gear its wheels in their direction.

But most importantly, there's no empathic president such as Jimmy Carter who would hold America to task about no-political-clout sub-Saharan famines, plagues (A.I.D.S.), and pestilent invasions (locusts of today).


edited to add: and welcome to DU, Mackenzie . . . :hi:

Thanks for the welcome!

Every time I do searches on this, it seems that the British media is superior to the U.S. media.

She said she supported removing the white farmers so that the blacks could have their land back. She said that famine was a small price to pay for her "brothers and sisters" to return to their land.

By that, I mean these lamentations for the white Zimbabwe farmer as the creator of the "breadbasket" of southern Africa. I have no problem with articles explaining that Mugabe is a terrible violator of human rights or that recent policies have contributed to food shortages and famine.

But every major empirical study of the earlier, orderly phase of land reform in Zimbabwe showed that small scale Black African farmers were more productive and efficient than large scale, capital intensive white farmers. These are studies by the World Bank and British Overseas Council, as well as locally based researchers.

White farmers in Zimbabwe were the ruination of the country. Holding, typically 1,000 to 10,000 acres, farming relatively small amounts of that land using hired labor and focusing on exports, large scale white farmers consumed more resources to produce agricultural goods per unit of output than small scale black farmers.

Before the political crisis, Zimbabwe had one of the most successful land reform programs in the history of developing countries. Because of the political power that the tiny minority of white farmers possessed, they negotiated at independence/majority rule, a deal wherein their land could not be expropriated unless they were paid in foreign currency (ie dollars or pounds). This meant that the land reform program had to be funded by British and American foreign aid. When the US and UK cut off funding, they precipitated the political crisis that led to disorderly and inefficient expropriations.

While I hope Mugabe is deposed, I also hope that all remnants of regressive white settler agriculture is rapidly dispensed with immediately upon the achievement of a political settlement. It is unfortunate that so many foreign reporters buy into the "white man as agricultural savior" of Zimbabwe trope.

That is considerably different spin than is generally reported. Can you document your claims?

Also, what exactly do you mean by expropriation? That word has some seriously negative connotations.

Here is one from J. Southern African Studies-- I'm actually rushing off to a meeting, but will provide more:

Land Reform, Growth and Equity: Emerging Evidence from Zimbabwe's Resettlement Programme - A Sequel, pp. 127-136
J. G. M. Hoogeveen; B. H. Kinsey
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0305-7070%28200103%2927%3A1%3C127%3ALRGAEE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

A large scale change like this does not happen overnight or smoothly. There is always a phase like this. It is a short-term price to pay. If the rest of the world had stepped up to its responsibilities and supported the change with transition funds, this would never have happened.

The good news is that in the long term, when the fewer large farms have been replaced by a large number of smaller farms, and when there is more human muscle working each acre of land, things will look up again. The per capita product may not reach what it was, but it will be available more evenly.

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