A Farm Disaster of a Different Color

Washington Post ^ | July 13, 2004 | Craig Timberg

[Clive]

A Farm Disaster of a Different Color

Mugabe's Land-Seizure Campaign Leaves a Black-Owned Business in Ruin

By Craig Timberg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, July 13, 2004; Page A10

ODZI, Zimbabwe -- Where rows of sweet corn once grew, there are now brown and dead stalks. Where beans once sprouted, there are weeds. And where 5,000 Zimbabweans long made a good living off the land, there is hunger.

Similar scenes are common on farms, most previously owned by white Zimbabweans, across this southern African nation after four years of violent land seizures under President Robert Mugabe. What is different about the Kondozi farm is that the owner of the business that was confiscated is black.

Edwin Moyo, who owned 52 percent of Kondozi, thrived at what was traditionally a white man's business in this former British colony, running a horticultural company that stocked vegetable bins throughout Britain and brought in $15 million a year to this poor corner of a poor nation.

But under a farm seizure program Mugabe has said was necessary to redistribute the ownership of land, Moyo's business met the same ruin as those owned by thousands of whites. On Good Friday, in April, dozens of police arrived with water cannons and submachine guns, Moyo said, and blocked off the road, looted the offices and beat anyone who sought to resist.

...

[Clive]

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[Just mythoughts]

Give them 6 months and CNN will be broacasting live the starving, and then America will ship boat loads of grain to the starving masses.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

Land seizure is the same as "reparations".

Sounds good but it kills.

I love the communist "experts" like Mugabe and Castro that ruin their countries because they know best!

Let's hope Hillary never gets her claws into America, because she has her own elitist ideas, not based on science, but based on her ideology.

[BlazingArizona]

Give them 6 months and CNN will be broacasting live the starving, and then America will ship boat loads of grain to the starving masses.

No we won't, because US grain is genetically modified. Europeans have convinced Africans that American food products will poison them.

[cyborg]

The days of Ronald Reagan are over. Appeasement and 'soft diplomacy' are the new thing.

[zlala]

I thought you'd be interested in this article.

[jimt]

Clearly Mugabe's racism is merely a tool to whip up the masses, and a fig leaf to hide behind so as not to show his real purpose, state control of everything.

Adolf Mugabe ?

[Oatka]

Give them 6 months and CNN will be broacasting live the starving, and then America will ship boat loads of grain to the starving masses.

No we won't, because US grain is genetically modified. Europeans have convinced Africans that American food products will poison them.

Think you're right. Nigerian muslims are talking against polio shots as well.

I remember during the early Cold War days when we were trying to help Thailand farmers by advising them to stock their ponds with fish as an alternate source of protein. The Communists told the farmers that eating the fish would make them sterile.

The Left, of any color, always against progress.

[gcruse]

Twenty-two farmers, most of whom are black and who sold beans, corn, melons and other crops under contract to Kondozi, also lost their livelihoods. Hundreds of other workers were employed by these smaller farms, many of which have stopped producing.

So, without Kondozi, their produce was worthless? 

[gcruse]

Clearly Mugabe's racism ...

The subject of the article is a black farmer.

[jimt]

The subject of the article is a black farmer.

Please read my post again.

I'm not at all sure Mugabe believes that victimhood racist bilge he spews. Like all socialists, what he really wants is control. Hence he hoses a black farmer as nastily as he would a white.