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.htmlIt 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.
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