Posted on 02/12/2003 8:00:39 AM PST by Clive
State urged to revive commercial farming
THE Nyamandlovu Farmers’ Association (NFA) says the government should seriously consider reviving large-scale commercial farming to avert a humanitarian crisis arising from acute food shortages.
Christopher Jarret, the NFA spokesperson, said yesterday farmers were deeply concerned at the widespread shortage of food now threatening more than half the population.
He said the re-introduction of full-scale commercial farming was the only way the country could be saved from its socio-economic crisis.
Jarret said: “There is only one way to minimise the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster inflicted by this calamitous land policy, and that is to resuscitate what remains of commercial agriculture, and encourage the industry to grow as much food as possible.” Jarret warned that if corrective measures were not implemented, the country was “headed for disaster”.
“The inevitable results of this destructive policy are now being visited upon industry and commerce. The rot on commercial agriculture is eating its insidious way through the rest of the economy and, inexorably, will continue until all is destroyed,” he said.
He said it was naive of the government to think that peasant farming could sustain the country.
“No industrialised country has ever fed itself on peasant subsistence agriculture. We fail to understand why the Zimbabwean government thinks that things will be different here.”
The association, which comprises displaced white farmers, has blamed the government and its chaotic land reform programme for the starvation currently ravaging the country.
Jarret said some of the farms forcibly acquired by the government were lying idle.
Exactly what the rest of us have been saying in different ways for the past 3 years.
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