Crisis-torn Zimbabwe is on the brink of “manmade starvation” with most households unable to obtain enough food to meet basic standards, a UN envoy has said.
This comes 17 years after Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean government seized large swathes of land from white farmers in the country, triggering a rapid downturn in the country’s economy.
“The people of Zimbabwe are slowly getting to a point of suffering a manmade starvation,” said Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food.
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“More than 60% of the population of a country once seen as the breadbasket of Africa is now considered food insecure, with most households unable to obtain enough food to meet basic needs due to hyperinflation,” said Elver.
How did the “breadbasket of Africa” reach the point of “manmade starvation“?
News24 reports that Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party launched the controversial land reforms in 2000, forcibly seizing white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks. Mugabe said the reforms were meant to correct colonial land ownership imbalances.
At least 4,000 white commercial farmers were evicted from their farms.
The land seizures were often violent, claiming the lives of several white farmers during clashes with veterans of Zimbabwe’s 1970s liberation struggle.
Critics of the reforms have blamed the programme for low production on the farms as the majority of the beneficiaries lacked the means and skills to work the land.
The Zimbabwean government’s message to exiled white farmers is now clear. Come back to Zimbabwe and save us.
The nation is offering land leases to white commercial farmers in an effort to re-start the nation’s agricultural industry.
Basil Nyabadza from Zimbabwe’s Agricultural and Rural and Development Authority says Zimbabwean farmers exiled in foreign lands should return to “home” soil.
The Government is now offering 99-year leases to white farmers, a deal previously reserved for black Zimbabweans.
The resignation of president Robert Mugabe last November and the swearing in of his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa has delivered significant change.
Government officials now admit the campaign of farm invasions that began in 2000 was a mistake.
“Clearly, the formulas deployed then, left a lot of bad feeling. And more importantly, the intellectual property, left our borders,” Mr Nyabadza said.
Without its professional, experienced farmers, Zimbabwe went from being an agricultural export powerhouse to having to rely on handouts from the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
Hyperinflation and a multi-decade depression followed.
History repeats
The news comes as South Africa threatens to follow in Zimbabwe’s doomed footsteps in seizing white farmers land and exiling them from the country.
South Africa is teetering on the brink of a race war after President Cyril Ramaphosa called on parliament to pass a law allowing white-owned land to be “confiscated” by blacks without any form of compensation.
Ramaphosa called white land ownership the “original sin”, and stated that he wants to see “the return of the land to the people from whom it was taken… to heal the divisions of the past.”
How does he plan on doing that?
Forcible confiscation. Specifically– confiscation without compensation.
“The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans.”
Ramaphosa did not mince his words. He’s talking about seizing land from white farmers and giving it to black South Africans — just like in neighboring Zimbabwe.
Astonishingly, Ramaphosa followed up that statement by saying, “We will handle it in a way that is not going to damage our economy. . .”
If South Africa refuses to learn the lessons of history, it is doomed to repeat them.
Baxter Dmitry
Email: baxter@thepeoplesvoice.tv
Let them starve.
Literally the only option. Leave them alone to their own devices.
Let them all Starve to death now..
You’d be a fool to go back. Once they get back on their feet at your expense, they’ll seize your farms, homes and assets again and kick you out. Let them live with the hell they created!
Its obvious how this happened.
let them starve and pay for their sins.
nancy pelosi will give them visas to fly over here and receive social security
Look no further than Africa to see the results of putting blacks in charge of other blacks. Famine, war, poverty, disease, chaos.
or Baltimore…
Screw em….Screw me once, shame on you…screw me twice, shame on me. They wanted the white farmers farms, now eat dirt,
No thanks. Those ignorant people should learn to help themselves.
My suspicion is that the current RSA situation is being used by the Chinese to cover their plan to grab covert control of the farmland, under cover of social justice expropriations.
Zimbabwe is a model for American Progressive Social Democrat Communists.
This outcome was warned years ago after the murders of white farmers for no other reason than greed and hate.Of course, the United States insisted you were a racist whitey if you ( those who tried to defend the South African farmers and land owners) protested getting into another countries business when the killing and thievery started. Wonder what they’ll be called now?
It is a false myth that the blacks were in South Africa before the Dutch whites got there in the early 1500s – 100 years before North America was colonized. The only natives who were in South Africa at the time were the Bushmen. There are very few of them remaining. The blacks came south much later than when the Dutch got there. The Dutch were the ones who created the farms. They were the original owners of the land. The Bushmen were migratory and didn’t own land.
3 “simple” steps to fix this.
1. Private property rights. Not leases, ownership.
2. Laws preventing future confiscation (especially without compensation).
3. A program like FFA that encourages farming specialization as a valuable and necessary skill set.
This mirrors what Stalin did to the barely prosperous Ukrainians. They were producing a slight surplus and demonized because of it. Productivity is a net positive for a society.
A lease is not secure enough for a business venture. Pray for wisdom to deal with the mess created !
Zimbabwe is going to be first in line to suck money from UN Climate Change Gurus. “OH, poor us!! It is not the murder of the farmers and local managers who KNEW HOW TO FARM that is causing our woes, it is evil CLimate Change, boo hoo” Next in the suck up line will be
South Africa, as its farmers flee.
I predicted this when they pushed out the farmers. Corn doesn’t just grow because you tossed a seed into the ground. Sucks to be them at this point. All white farmers stay away. Once you get the land back to growing again they will just kick you our again and start the process all over. Dumb African leaders.
Baxter, you forgot to mention that Zim has already enticed and then expropriated an entire second generation of White farmers. Who wants to volunteer to join the third generation of eventual targets? And SA has already had several reallocation schemes that all failed because the Black beneficiaries couldn’t make their newly acquired farms pay, so rather than go broke, they sold them to White owners. Some of the SA target farms have been under cultivation by the same families for two or three hundred years; the owners’ knowledge of those properties is irreplaceable. The weight of politics in both countries bodes not well for the future.
Mugabe and other leaders were amply warned of what the consequences would be of their policies, they chose to ignore it. Kind of like our present liberal (and brain dead) leadership here in the US now.