-Caveat Lector- http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,776643,00.html
"...Abednico Ncube, was quoted in a local newspaper as telling villagers that food 'will be available only to those who dump the opposition and work with Zanu-PF'. " Mugabe fails to heed pleas of starving Declan Walsh reports from the Zambezi Valley, where land redistribution has fatally deepened a drought-led food crisis Sunday August 18, 2002 The Observer A straggly queue trailed around the fence of the government grain store in Muzarabani, a village on the floor of the Zambezi Valley in northern Zimbabwe. An old man shook his head in disgust. The shelves were empty - again. 'This is crazy. We've been waiting here for five days,' said 68-year- old Sinet Muzanenhamo, slumped under the shade of a tree. A truck had come to the store, known as Grain Marketing Board (GMB), three days earlier, he explained. But it carried just 100 bags of maize for more than 1,000 waiting people. He got nothing. 'By now, we are eating only once a day,' he said, fingering a piece of worn cardboard that showed that he was 10th in line. 'We fear that soon it will be nothing at all.' All across Zimbabwe, the story is the same - a chronic shortage of maize, exacerbated by stubbornly destructive government policies, is pushing a once plentiful country to the verge of famine. The full folly of President Robert Mugabe's land redistribution programme is being laid bare. Yesterday farm groups said that 80 white farmers had been arrested and some charged for defying government orders to vacate land targeted for redistribution to landless blacks. Of the remaining 4,500 white farmers, 2,900 have been told to quit their land without compensation. Nearly two-thirds are refusing to go. According to the United Nations, more than half of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people are going to need urgent food assistance in the coming months. Famine is not inevitable - yet. Aid food is starting to arrive, and malnutrition rates remain relatively low - around 5 per cent in some areas. But it is a fragile stability, aid workers warn. 'People's capacity to cope is almost exhausted,' said Chris McIvor of Save the Children-UK. 'Once that goes, there can be a very rapid decline. We could be looking at a catastrophic situation by December.' Across the country, the early signs of starvation are starting to show. In classrooms, children are fainting or dropping out of school entirely to search for wild food. Some have died after eating poisonous roots. To the south, young women are flocking to the border town of Beit Bridge, to prostitute themselves to the passing truckers. There is competition from wild animals. Near Chadereka, two men lie in hospital, one of them close to death. He was attacked by an elephant while picking berries off wild trees; a buffalo gored his neighbour. Foreign aid has not yet reached Chadereka, a sleepy village further inside the Zambezi Valley, near the border with Mozambique. With maize hardly available, villagers have turned to masawu - berries normally used for making moonshine - to fill their stomachs. 'But this type of food, it doesn't stay,' complained Dzidzai Musinyari, a 22-year-old woman who was seven months pregnant. 'You eat it, go to the toilet and then it is all gone.' Her five-year-old son was starting to suffer from diarrhoea. The valley people used to farm cotton, then use their earnings to buy maize grown in the fertile highlands. Not any more. The crisis cannot be blamed entirely on Mugabe. It was sparked by a sharp drought at the beginning of this year, wrecking the maize harvest. The scourge of HIV/Aids made things worse: one in three Zimbabwean adults is infected with HIV, and there are more than 600,000 Aids orphans. Grandparents find themselves struggling to feed the children of their dead sons and daughters. But if bad weather sparked the crisis, Mugabe's ruinous policies have made it infinitely worse. He has closed down food-producing white farms. He has beggared the economy, cutting off access to foreign currency needed to import food. He has maintained a steely grip on the monopoly of maize imports, though private trade is vital to fend off disaster. Zimbabwe used to be self-sufficient in maize, with commercial farms meeting almost half of the requirements. But this year, drought and farmer intimidation have caused production to plummet by 70 per cent. More significantly, the tobacco industry, which brought in much of the country's foreign currency, has also collapsed. As the government struggles to import food from abroad, it is discovering that there is precious little hard cash with which to buy it. Under current plans, a famine can be averted if the government, aid agencies and private traders each import one third of the maize deficit. The aid agencies should keep their part of the bargain, at least until Christmas. But the government is broke, so scepticism abounds that Mugabe will be able to import 500,000 tonnes of maize in the coming months, as promised. He is refusing to allow private traders to bring in food from abroad, because prices would inevitably rise, perhaps as much as tenfold. Foreign donors are desperately trying to persuade Mugabe that this is the only way forward. Those with money, mostly in urban areas, could become self-sufficient, leaving the aid agencies and government to concentrate on the most vulnerable people in rural areas. But this would also highlight to Mugabe's supporters how poor his policies have been, so he has refused to listen. Instead, his cronies have been accused of playing dirty politics with food aid. In June, war veterans shut down a Catholic Church project to feed 40,000 people in the western Binga province. They claimed that the project, which is funded by the British agency Cafod, was being run by supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. More recently, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abednico Ncube, was quoted in a local newspaper as telling villagers that food 'will be available only to those who dump the opposition and work with Zanu-PF'. Some 13m people in southern Africa, across Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho, are threatened with famine in the coming months. Zimbabwe should be anchoring the region; instead it is pulling it down. While the suffering is most extreme in Malawi, the sheer scale of numbers makes Zimbabwe the most vulnerable country. But Mugabe has acted with an arrogant cool towards international aid. He recently warned parliament of the need to 'remain wary of countries and organisations which seek to take advantage of our hour of need'. There were 'sinister interests', he claimed, that wanted to use the 'cover of humanitarian involvement'. The irony is that foreign money is the only thing keeping his country from slipping into starvation. Britain, which is frequently derided as the great colonial evil, is putting £32m into Zimbabwe this year. The European Union has pledged €35m (£22m). One frustrated diplomat said: 'Things are getting worse and worse, yet it appears he is more interested in power politics than helping his own people.' Speaking at Heroes' Acre, the national shrine for black liberation fighters, Mugabe vowed last week to ensure that 'no Zimbabwean starves to death'. It is increasingly clear that the ageing autocrat is running out of both money and ideas. But if he does not find a way of getting food into Zimbabwe, fast, a preventable disaster may soon become an inevitable famine. -- Outgoing mail is certified virus free Scanned by Norton AntiVirus Communal/managed economics have always been more destructive of their societies than those driven by greed. This is what the Dosadi say: Greed sets its own limits, its self-regulation. ~~Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Analysis -- a Bureau of Sabatoge Text <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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