More than a decade and a half ago during the worst southern Africa drought in a generation, to drive through the countryside of Zimbabwe was to witness an advanced agricultural economy trying to cope with the worst of Mother Nature.
Food production was down, land was being left fallow and a regional food-exporting nation was reduced to imports and food aid.
It was humiliating.
“We boasted a few years ago of being the breadbasket of Africa,” Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union president Gary Magadzire told a visiting reporter at the time. “Now, 12 months later, we are beggars for food. It is a shame. In the African context, the person who can’t feed himself has no right to address anyone.”
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Sixteen year later, Zimbabwe is a national train wreck, a once-productive country that by any definition is a basket case.
It is a stark reminder that agricultural productivity and a functioning farm system cannot be taken for granted and that political decisions can destroy what seems like a Garden of Eden.
Unstable weather and the march of AIDS across the countryside hold some of the blame but the vast bulk is attributable to political decisions made by the government of president Robert Mugabe, who clings to power despite evidence all around him that he no longer is fit to govern.
A recent special Zimbabwe report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization describes a country spiraling into the abyss, no longer able to feed itself and no longer able to claim that it has a functioning modern economy.
Production of corn, the main food staple, is expected to fall 28 percent this year after a decline last year of 44 percent.
“The large-scale commercial sector now produces less than one-tenth of the maize (corn) that it produced in the 1990s,” says the report. And production from the small-scale communal farmers is now one-quarter of what it was just a decade ago.
At the core of the disaster has been Mugabe’s decision to oversee the displacement of most of the country’s large-scale commercial white farmers, replacing them with landless black people, so-called veterans of the 1970s struggle to end despotic white rule and the apartheid regime of Ian Smith.
The new owners, most with no farming experience, cultivate only half of the available land and then at a very low productivity level.
Add to that an official inflation rate of 2.2 million percent and the situation becomes hopeless. Farmers cannot afford inputs, fuel or investments and consumers cannot afford the food that is produced.
Without a functioning currency, much of the country has reverted to a barter economy.
The FAO estimates that by the “hungry season” next winter, more than five million people out of a population of little more than 12 million will be food insecure.
Meanwhile, after accusing them of supporting his political opponents, the Zimbabwean leader has ordered aid groups to quit distributing food in the country.
During an incredible speech in early June to an FAO world food crisis summit in Rome, Mugabe blamed his country’s food and economic troubles on the lingering effects of white racism and British colonialism.
Surely, even with the world’s highest inflation rate, the president could afford to buy himself a mirror in his search for culprits.
