Posted on 12/02/2002 5:00:59 AM PST by Clive
LANDS and agriculture minister, Joseph Made, finally admitted last week that government has failed to ensure food security for the famine-stricken nation, more than a year after repeatedly dismissing warnings of a serious grain shortage.
Made stunned members of the lands, agriculture and rural development committee on Monday, by painting a grim picture of the food situation in Zimbabwe.
The Standard was the only newspaper to attend the committee meeting, a situation which troubled Made enough for him to say: "Mr Chairman, I would have preferred a balanced mix of reporters."
The minister said apart from accumulating a serious maize deficit each week, government had not the slightest clue of the amount of grain farmers resettled under the controversial and chaotic land reform exercise would produce this current season.
Said Made: "The country needs 35,000 tonnes of maize, but it is only able to import 22,000 tonnes, leaving a deficit of 13,000 tonnes every week. At one time, we ordered 400,000 tonnes, but only got 118,000 delivered. This is a big challenge for us as we will continue to need the stocks to feed the population. We don't know when we will be able to get these remaining stocks, but we are trying to make sure that they are in the country so we can distribute it.''
Asked by Renson Gasela-the former Grain Marketing Board (GMB) head who is also the MDC shadow minister for lands and agriculture-why it was that government was failing to fulfil the simple task of buying grain in bulk, Made said: "I don't have the purse to buy the adequate maize supplies. Remember, it is allocated to us, so please bear with me." On his ministry's projected figures for the coming season, the minister said no such estimates were available. "At the moment, we don't have the projected figures of what we have planted this season and this is a big problem for us as government. We only hope that the new farmers will be able to produce enough grain to feed the country,'' said Made. Agricultural production was last season severely hampered by a combination of crippling drought and government-induced disturbances on commercial farms. The government went on to grab farms from about 3,000 commercial farmers, leaving the highly specialised sector with an estimated 1 000 farmers. Speaking after the meeting, also attended by Zanu PF MPs Kumbirai Kangai and Paul Mazikana, Gasela who was ordered by committee chairman Daniel Mackenzie Ncube not to ask too many questions, expressed disgust at the way government had up to this time failed to tell the nation the truth. "The nation will obviously be shocked by the minister's admission that the problem is far from over and that they are not even sure of what will come out of their much touted land reform exercise. We are in the middle of the rainy season, and Made chooses this time to expose his inability to plan. Surely this is a testimony of how the Mugabe regime is determined to drag our nation into further economic abyss,'' Gasela told The Standard. Made, one of the ministers handpicked by Mugabe after the June 2000 parliamentary election, has in the past misled the nation about the food situation. Last year, he dismissed early warning signs of a serious maize deficit, saying according to the knowledge he had gained from aerial flights across the country, Zimbabwe would have adequate grain supplies. However, several months later, Zimbabwe is facing a food crisis and over six million people are in need of food aid. Agricultural-based commodities such as bread, cooking oil and sugar are also in short supply. Long queues of people seeking bread and mealie meal have become the order of the day at shops throughout the country. The worst affected areas are the rural constituencies where the majority of the population are not gainfully employed. The Standard understands that the government is importing food from America, Argentina and Europe. Two years ago, government embarked on a land resettlement programme which saw white commercial farmers being displaced by indigenous farmers. The majority of these new farmers have not bothered to take up their pieces of land.
The summer crop last year was grossly deficient because of land invasions and was consumed within a month of the harvest.
An attempt at winter maize cultivation in the winter that has just ended was a dismal failure and also served to take land out of production for winter wheat. Zim is tropical but the climate is modified by altitude such that temperatures can hit 0 celsius at night. There are no winter maize hybrids developed as commercial operators well knew, which Made apparently didn't, that winter maize is an inappropriate crop for Zim. India has winter maize hybrids but they are not designed for Zim.
The summer planting season is effectively over and the southern hemisphere summer solstice is less than 3 weeks away, yet the planting has not been done. There will be no maize crop this summer.
Yet, all the international maize requirements forecasting for famine relief is based on requirements between now and an expected summer harvest in March 2003.
Hopefully the starving "new farmers" will eat Made, as they haven't a clue how to farm.
Atlas is shrugging. Let them starve.
The ability to plan, the essence of civilization.
That is a deficit of 37% per week!
At one time, we ordered 400,000 tonnes, but only got 118,000 delivered.
They only got 29 1/2% of their order. Unless they can make up the difference with some other staple, it looks pretty bleak. It's not like they can call up Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, or Tanzania and say "Hey, we're a bit short on corn - can you give us an extra 676,000 tons for the year and we'll pay you back later."
Zimbabwe wil be the second. I think Carthage was the first.
The Middle East may take the next 10-12 awards though.
What, not another central planning failure? We all know how well central planning worked in the Soviet Union, ooops! There is no Soviet Union anymore..... gee, I wonder why?
How anyone can be surprised by this lack of food/crop failure in Zimbabwe is beyond me; it is a carefully planned pogrom by the government to control its citizens by manipulating the supply of food. As long as there is a shortage, and the government controls distribution of the food supplies, the government has the raw power to starve those elements of the populace who oppose it.
This food shortage is not the result of incompetence; it is the result of a carefully planned brutal government scheme to murder its opposition. That's why the independent white farms had to be put out of business under the rubric of "land reform." So long as independent (privately owned and operated) productive farms exist, Mugabe can't control the distribution of food, and won't be assured of having a shortage. As most of the productive farm land in Zimbabwe was owned by white's, they had to go, and the "land reform" scam was the perfect ploy by which to accomplish it.
I have predicted this before, and will repeat it here: the food shortage in Zimbabwe will end the day after the last member of Mugabe's political opposition has starved to death. OF course, there will always be someone brave enough to oppose a tyrant like Mugabe, so it is axiomatic that as long as Mugabe, or any other bloodthirsty tyrant like him, remains in power, Zimbabwe will suffer crop "failures" and food shortages.
The day that Zimbabwe's farmers, white, black, or polka-dotted, are permitted to own their own land, farm it as they please, and sell the fruit of their own labor on a free market is the day when Zimbabwe will be able to feed itself. So long as tyrants rule, people will starve, and the tyrant will decide who will do the starving.
Because of El Niño, the rainfall is expected to be lower than normal in the latter part of the season.
Planting a short season hybrid will require irrigation and technology to bring the crop to harvest. It will also require the immediate availability of hybrid seed stock.
The squatters have been busily destroying the drip irrigation lines and converting their confiscated lands to slash-and-burn, scratch, beast-draughted, subsistence agriculture much more suitable to the rich black alluvial soil that the autochtones have traditionally farmed rather than the red soil dry land veldt that the Europeans have been farming.
The farm invaders have also taken over the seed farms and put them out of production.
As to using genetically modified maize, Zimbabwe is at the forefront of southern Africa's opposition to using it even as famine relief.
Politicians should never believe their own propaganda, much less make technological decisions on its basis. Here the party line was that the Whites had stolen all the best land, and it was time for The PeePull to set things right. First, the bulk of the evictees are black, not white, second, it is the farming technique rather than the land itself that was responsible for the high rate of food production, and third, the people attempting subsistence farming on that land find that their net production is less than subsistence level. No surplus in sight, in fact, a net deficit.
The ground assumptions were very Marxist in nature - that the workers did the work and the bourgeoisie reaped the benefits in terms of profits. And, of course, that the workers were pretty much interchangeable. So productive, experienced farmers were replaced by political followers, and the nominal ownership of the farms given to more political followers, and they're wondering why the only surplus here is hot air.
I suspect the hope here is threefold: first, that the ones to do the dying early on will be Mugabe's political opponents, second, that somehow Mugabe's followers won't starve right along with them, and third, that the world will step in to save the situation once the objectionable are dead. Plan B involves a Swiss bank account and asylum in South America. It's a much, much smaller plan.
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