You mean these guys?
I don’t know. They kinda look like pansies to me.
Ha ha ha. I was joking. Don’t take that seriously.
Please!
Posted on 07/13/2002 2:19:36 AM PDT by Clive
The social disaster in Zimbabwe cannot be measured. More than 100,000 displaced farm workers are now living wretched lives in refugee camps and another 200,000 are expected to be displaced within the coming month.
More than a quarter of a million children who were being educated in schools built and maintained by commercial farmers cannot now expect to continue their education.
Perhaps 80,000 industrial jobs will be lost in industry as supplies of agricultural inputs run down, or as their former customers for crop inputs are driven from the land.
Three quarters of the agricultural exports will come to an end with the destruction of commercial agriculture and the loss of this revenue will damage or destroy the prospects of survival of most of the remaining businesses and most other urban jobs.
The only political figure in recent history who comes close to Robert Mugabe's wilful destruction of the lives of his own citizens and his country's economic resources is Pol Pot.
Because Pol Pot's romantic, but absurd vision of the perfect pastoral life under a peasant agricultural economy could accommodate only about a quarter of Cambodia's actual population, he started to ruthlessly slaughter the excess numbers, choosing to kill any with an education or who showed reluctance to slip quietly under his totalitarian subjugation.
Zimbabwe's carrying capacity for its human population has been boosted vigorously over the years by industrial growth and the adoption of first world technologies, and the population now stands at about 13 million.
However, its carrying capacity if the people are forced to revert to peasant agriculture will be no more than a quarter of that.
The climate is too hostile, the ecology too fragile and the natural hazards of crop diseases and pest invasions are too destructive to farm successfully in any manner other than in the highly capital and management-intensive commercial methods that are now being destroyed.
By being forced to accept the basic farming methods of their ancestors, Zimbabwe's new farmland occupiers will face poverty and starvation on the million small plots being carved out of the 6,000 commercial farms now being nationalised.
If Zimbabwe's carrying capacity is to be brought down to three million by these destructive acts, the ten million who are clearly surplus to Robert Mugabe's vision of the future will soon become a major hazard to the stability of the region and areas much further afield as the waves of refugees spread across the world.
Like Pol Pot's ideas, they are doomed to fail. It is up to those of us who can do something to stop the madness in its tracks to ensure that it fails sooner rather than later, and preferably before much bigger shock-waves of misery and distress coming from Zimbabwe reach across the world.
John Robertson is one of Zimbabwe's leading economists
You mean these guys?
I don’t know. They kinda look like pansies to me.
Ha ha ha. I was joking. Don’t take that seriously.
Please!
Of course, it's all the White Man's fault.
We are seeing the same thing happen, even here in rural, central Missouri. Many Mexican immigrants (also many illegals) are coming here to work in the Tyson plant. At least that's what started it. Now we have a 2-hour talk show in Spanish on Saturdays, Spanish language signs in the local stores, increase in crime rate, etc.
I guess it's a "brave new world" out there! :^)
Carolyn
It would b bloody, but in the long run the butcher's bill will be less because it will be finished quicker.
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