Farming in Zimbabwe

[Srrh]

Today, this appeared on the bbcnews.com site:
"A special Commonwealth committee on Zimbabwe has failed to agree on new sanctions against President Robert Mugabe.

The Commonwealth "troika" - including the leaders of South Africa, Nigeria, and Australia - had a mandate to approve a tougher stance against the Harare government at talks in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he was in favour of the full suspension of Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth.

But Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria took an opposing view - saying that moves towards political reform in Zimbabwe would be monitored in the next six months.

In March the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe from its councils for a year, following Mr Mugabe's controversial re-election.
Mugabe refused to attend the meeting
At the time, the Commonwealth said the poll was "carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation" and "did not reflect the views of the Zimbabwean people."
After the Abuja talks, all three leaders expressed their disappointment that President Robert Mugabe had refused to attend the meeting.
In a joint statement, they said they deeply regretted that the process of reconciliation had stalled in Zimbabwe.
The BBC's Dan Isaacs in Abuja says failure to reach a consensus at this meeting will bring criticism that no firm action has been taken.
Since March the forced eviction of white farmers from their land has gathered pace, and there has been no sign of political reform.
Last week Zimbabwe's parliament adopted new legislation making evictions easier.
Mugabe's supporters have been occupying farns
It will force farmers to leave their land within a week of being served eviction notices, rather than the 90-day deadline previously in place.
Many farmers had used the 90 days to appeal against their eviction orders, many of which were subsequently annulled by the High Court.
Under the new law, these cancelled eviction orders can be reissued.
Zimbabwe's opposition has called the changes unconstitutional, saying they effectively deny farmers the protection of the courts
The European Union has imposed a travel ban on senior Zimbabwean officials throughout the EU.
Any assets they hold has also been frozen.
The EU's action has welcomed by Zimbabwe's opposition, but condemned as racist by the government. "

Zimbabwe declare EU's action racist... ;D Is it just me or everything is not black and white (pun intented) in this story ?

I re-started this thread as a continium for "Mugabe, the great African Hero" on the old SC.

Srrh

[Wycco]

I certainly believe, on some level, the African nations are protecting Mugabe because they wish they could do what he is doing- but THANKFULLY, they realise what he is doing IS wrong.

Mugabe is an evil-evil man. He has stolen democracy from a previously democratic nation.

If the US really wants to play God with nations- they should be removing Mugabe NOT Hussein. It is a frightening thought- what if the racism spread from Zimbabwe into the rest of Africa- and an ethnic cleansing covered the entire continent?

[Srrh]

Wycco said:

I certainly believe, on some level, the African nations are protecting Mugabe because they wish they could do what he is doing

That's my sentiments EXACTLY.
What other african Countries would be in a posiition to do so?

And to go back to the original arguments: doesn't this lead you to beleive that (for his fellow Africans at least) he has a point? Maybe he does?

Srrh

[Wycco]

I don't think that makes him their hero. Or, at least I hope it doesn't.

I think most of the African leaders probably realise what Mugabe is doing is wrong- they may sypathise with him and his struggle, but, at least-I hope, they realise what he is doing is seriously wrong.

Raptor would be the ideal person to comment on this- I'm sure he knows how the people of Africa feel about Mugabe better than any of us...

Raptor, any comments?

[raptor22]

Hey guys, Apologies for this late reply. I've been riding a dromedari (camel) in the sahara and climbing sanstone formations in Tunisia for the last week. What a load fun. would recommend it to anyone. Very helpful if you speak French though. Fortunately I have friends in that country so getting the best deal was easy. just some negotiation and price matching hey presto.

Anyway back to Zimbabwe.
The majority of African people feel that what he is doing is wrong or at least the way he is going about it. the problem in Zimbabwe and many other African nations is that the western world tends to think of African governments as stupid, corrupt, incompetant etc but largely this is not the case. Yes there are many dictators who do things only in their own interest.

To understand the Zimbabwean situation you have to go back 20 odd years to colonial rule.
When Rodesia was handed over to it's people for local rule and renamed Zimbabwe, the final act of gratitude by the british government was to give farms to the poeple who were already farmiong there on a commercial scale i.e. British desended whites. Now giving away land that does'nt actually belong to you anymore is'nt exactly best practise, but o fcourse the world felt that it was for Zim's best as it's black population were largely unskilled and were mainly subsistance farmers. A sort of What do they know attitude. Anyway Bobby Mu kept on trucking and bowed to the western worlds wishes and played puppit to the IMF and world Bank. then He had enough.

The farms that were supposed to be growing grain were growing tobacco. Not exactly edible stuff. when the Southern African region was plunged into drought in the late 80's Zim was affected as well and the subsistence farmers suffered the most. Stilll the comercial farmer continued t grow lucrative tobacco crops and not help address to food shortage.

This brings us to today, Why is Booby Mu acting so badly. why is he being a racist prick by evicting white flk from their farms. Two reasons. There is a food shortage and he needs grain not cigarettes. He needs to set up farms that produce useful crops which will address the food shortage as well as be commercially lucrative.

Yes he is being very racist in his implementation but the d river behind it is the good of Zimbabwe, hence the reason why other african leaders are not exacty jumping on the band wagon of critism. South Africa will not go the same way because we already have large commercial farms growing crops to feed the people of SA. Currently SA supplys it's excess to Zim as well as Fuel and Electricity.
secondly, with over 50% of our trade with sub Sharan Africa going directly through Zimbabwe we don't want to piss the man off too much by telling him that he is going about this incorrectly.
The issue is a lot more complex than portrayed by the media. the driver is'nt racism, it's to address a food shortage without having to bend to unfavourable conditions laid down by the subsidised industries of the western world.
You see Africa wants to be a TEXT to the global economy, not a slave to it.


another article to follow

[raptor22]

Another interesting article. Read this and think ....
Robert Mugabe is portrayed as the prince of darkness, but when whites expel black people from their lands, nobody gives a damn.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th August 2002


The most evil man on earth, besides Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world's press.

Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave their land. He claims to be redistributing their property to landless peasants, but many of the farms he has seized have been handed instead to army officers and party loyalists. Twelve white farmers have been killed and many others beaten. He stole the elections in March through ballot rigging and the intimidation of his political rivals. His assault on white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph as the principal reason for the current famine. Now, the paper maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". As a candidate for the post of World's Third Most Evil Man, he appears to possess all the right credentials.

There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies are contributing to the further impoverishment of the Zimbabweans. But to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for the nation's hunger is fanciful. Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize -- its primary staple crop -- is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security. For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development.

Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organised in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania. Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology. The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped. For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me, "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development."

[raptor22]

contiued:The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story. Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media.

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent both of racism and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites.

But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programmes, with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it. Over the past ten years, according the the UN's latest human development report, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a dollar a day has risen from 242 to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the whites, the poorer their people become.

Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon". The United States has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to accept GM maize as food relief. Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the foodchain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they must either accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatise the reserve. The private body was not capitalised, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve. The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidising food or stabilising prices.

The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidised food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform. Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to ten times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies which supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in Zimbabwe which created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black people but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid. Let us condemn Mugabe's racist attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war which the rich world wages against the poor.


I trust you appreciate that I am not infavour of how Mr Mugabe is implementing his land reform policy but I do agree that Land reform in that county has to take place if they are to achieve a sustainable agricultural base to address future food requirements without having to play slave to the World Banks and IMF.

8-)R22

[Srrh]

Very interesting read.
Thanks R22.
Although I don't beleive 2 wrong make a right (US, UK or Canada did it, so others can do it sort of logic) it certainly sheds a light on the crisis, I was unable to gather from more traditional news media.

Srrh

[Wycco]

Sounds like you had a fun vacation! No camels or Sahara in South Carolina- LOL- although there is a place just up North of us a little bit that takes you hiking with the camel's American cousin, the Llama, across the blue ridge mountains.

Good to hear from you on this thread- I figured you would know more about this than any of us outside the continent...

raptor22 said:

The farms that were supposed to be growing grain were growing tobacco. Not exactly edible stuff. when the Southern African region was plunged into drought in the late 80's Zim was affected as well and the subsistence farmers suffered the most. Stilll the comercial farmer continued t grow lucrative tobacco crops and not help address to food shortage.

- there is a way governments can legally coerce the people to produce more beneficial crops... tax heavily cash crops (such as tobacco) and give tax breaks to food producers- I wish Mugabe had taken some economics classes- people obey the almighty dollar more than the sword.

[raptor22]

Yes thats exactly the point, There were many other ways to go about land reform. But Since his influence and popularity was waining he decided to be a bitmore dramatic about it.
The fault also lies with him because he waited to long before taking action.
So now we have a pretty ittle mess brewing there. It's not a pleasant situation for anyone to be evicted from your home, especially when you have been living there all your life. What he is doing now is what the Aparthied government implemented in the 60's with the forced removals of peoples from their homes because those areas were now demacated "Whites Only". Back then the Nationalist Government also had a good excuse for doing what they did. They wanted to create an upper class, Middle class and labourer market. Problem was they did it according to skin colour.

So Mugabe is essentially re-inventing the wheel here but his reasons are sound (land Reform). The implementation really sucks!!

[Henrik]

I would say that regardless if the basis of his actions may be sound, it seems to me that there is a predominant lust for power that drives his ultimate decisions.

Mugabe realized he was losing power and control of the country. There is more than a fair chance that he would have lost the last elections, and so in a desperate attempt to maintain his position, he embarked on the road that he is now on. Okay, he "saved" the elections, but I think his time will be up shortly regardless.

As is usually the case, a country's well-being is discarded in favour of one individual's lust for power. We have seen it before, and we will see it again...

[raptor22]

definately, this point everyone agrees with even Pres Thabo Mbeki who several times has hinted that a different regime is needed to bring Zimbabwe into the 21century. Robert mugabe is not the kind of leaderwe need in Zimbabwe. His motives to are two faced but mainly he wants to stay in power.

R22

[Danny Boy]

Raptor, I’m not sure that I would like you teaching my history lessons.
No mention of UDI, the civil war between black and white?
As for the British Government, they were far from being benefactors, screwing both black and white Zimbabweans/Rhodesians from Ian Smiths time up until the present.
In the “first” land reforms of the early80, s most of the reclaimed farms (from the white farmers) ended up belonging to Mugabe’s family, which is the excuse given by the British Government for stopping compensation payments to white farmers who lost their farms. Magabe has been manipulating/stabbing people in the back since his election in 1980.
You comment on the Southern Africa Drought does not mention that Magabe is stopping the delivery of foreign food aid being delivered to regions controlled by his political opponents. Whilst several million will need food aid (most of these will survive) you neglect to mention that in the last 5 years, 1 million have died of Aids, 2 million have Aids and there are ½ million orphans whose parents died of Aids, and this is only in Zimbabwe, a country of less than 12 million people. I cannot believe you have the same attitude on Aids as Thabo Mbeki, even if you are from the same country.
Robert Mugabe may have been the great black hope of the 80’s but history will have a very sad tale to tell when his reign is over.

[raptor22]

Danny,

Aids is a separate issue, It's a global problem. It's rife in Africa due to lack of education and a strong cultural reluctance to dispense of witch doctors in favour of science.
The Civil war in Zim was related to tehm gaining independance. You could say that the current situation is an extention on Mugabes hatred of white people in general.
I don't hink that you have read my threads correctly. You seem to hav the impression that I support his moves. I don't.
I think they are racist and undemocratic, Selfish and only suit his own political agenda.
What I am ssaying is that he is hiding behind @lansd Reform' which is recognised as an essential for Zimbabwe to maintain it's food supply and the integrity of it's farm land.
The people he is distributing the land too is farcical. I have a friend who lives in London, his uncles both lost their farms, which are now owned by zimbabweans living in the UK, and who have no interest in the country apart from maintaining their passport.

Everyone in the region is in agreement that Uncle Bobby needs to go. he has lost his marbles.

The article by Goerge Monbiot gives a different perspective to teh situation but does not praise the man for his actions, it merely puts in context with what is a greater African problem.

As for Thabo Mbeki's standpoint on AIDS, I think you should have been at the speach he gave and not watched the edited news version which gave a completely different slant on the matter.
Mbeki knows what causes AIDS, but he also knows what it takes to cure the desease. Education can contain it, but only money can cure it.
US pharmaceutical company's charge somewhere around $10 per Pill. The production cost is less than $1. How the heck are african people who have to live on an income of around $200 a year supposed to afford that medication? There have been discussions with the pharmaceutical industry to license the production of these medicines but thus far they have resisted, citing ownership of intellectual property as the main reason. People are dying and Intellectual property is what prevents them from living a longer life. Wheres the corruption???

[Danny Boy]

I could not agree more about the cost of drugs, sadly now that America is the only world power, money and more money is the god of those in, and behind, the policy makers there.
Not sure I am in complete agreement about Thabo Mbeki's, he could do more to make the public aware of the dangers. The little HIV positive girl in Sesame Street will probably do more than he does in making the public aware of the dangers of aids.
I never thought you were a supporter of Magabe, I think he is/was an evil bastard from day one, but then so are most career politicians (Ken Livingston excepted). How they will ever solve the problem in Zimbabwe and other desperate African countries, it is beyond me. What I do know is, that not calling a man a crook when he so patently is, sends the wrong message to the rest of Africa.
I am sad to say that I have forgotten the name of the little kid who was dying of aids. He stole the hearts of all those at the meeting with his speech, can you remember it?