Posted on 03/05/2006 9:27:34 AM PST by LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget
(SNIP) Graham Hatty has already been up for hours. Bouncing in his Indian-made jeep down a track that borders his property, Hatty points out a pair of kestrels gliding on a breeze, and a flock of Abyssinian rollers sweeping across the brightening sky. "It's a bird watcher's paradise," says the 66-year-old Zimbabwean farmer. But Hatty has more on his mind than nature viewing. He pulls alongside a dozen Nigerian laborers packing burlap sacks with maize. The farmer runs his fingers through the yellow kernels, and draws back in revulsion: the bag is infested with weevils, gnatlike bugs that can quickly destroy a whole crop. "We'll have to fumigate the maize to get rid of these pests," he says. "I haven't seen these insects before in Nigeria. We've got a lot to learn here."
The learning curve has been steep since Hatty and a dozen other white farmers fled Zimbabwe last year to restart their lives in the Nigerian bush. The 13 men were among 4,000 whites who lost their farms in a disastrous land-reform program initiated six years ago by President Robert Mugabe. Now Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, is harnessing the expertise of these Zimbabwean castoffs to revive Nigeria's commercial agriculture, which has fallen into ruin since the country became a major oil producer in the 1960s. It is still too early to assess the results, but Obasanjo's experiment is spreading. Dispossessed white farmers have settled in Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Uganda. In Nigeria, 20 more farmers from Zimbabwe will soon take over land in both Kwara and the region around Abuja, Nigeria's capital; 75 others are on the waiting list. "You can plant anything here and it grows," (SNIP) "If it gets itself together, Nigeria could feed Africa."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Nigeria may be a good choice agriculturally but it's a mess politically. Politics causes famine.
Indeed. I wonder the same thing. Why are there no black farmers stepping up? Of course, the people who got the farms in Zim were connected, and had nothing to do with farming. Or they were thugs. Or am I repeating myself?
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