True.
But it is even worse than that.
Mugabe had evicted over 90 percent of the 4,500 commercial farmers in Zimbabwe and the remainder are still under threat of eviction.
Included in the evictions are the maize hybrid seed farms.
The farms have been cut up into small parcels, amny of which are sub-economic for veldt farming.
At best, some of the "settlers" (actually squatters) are alluvial soil farmers used to beast draughted, slash-and-burn, scratch agriculture on rich black alluvial soil irrigated entirely by rainfall or sooping from creeks. That type of agriculture simply doesn't work on the veldt. Velt farming is dry-land farming on nutrient poor red soil requiring fertilization and sophisticated drip irrigation from impounded water. There are instances of squatters ripping up the irrigation lines or ignoring them and sending the wives and chilren more than a kilometer to streams to fetch water.
At worst, most of the the squatters are city inhabitants who had iromantized visions of a bucolic life and the very best land was siezed by top level party cadre (so-called "cell phone farmers" who only see their land on weekends).
So the 2002 summer crop was markedly below norm, even for drought conditions (even in the drought, the irrigation dams are mostly full because of a paucity of crops to irrigate) The crop for the winter that just ended essentially failed and the crop for the summer that is now past planting time has not been planted.
The government has siezed maize supplies including ordinary reserves needed to feed households and employees and trumpeted the siezures as evidence of hoarding.
The government has set retail price controls based on an official foreign exchange rate of Z$55.00 to US$1.00 while the actual rate is 1800-to-1 which means that anyone selling food in Zim is doing so at a major loss. The failure of business to import staples to sell at a loss is deemed to be evidence of sabotage by traitors conspiring with the UK to return Zim to colonial status.
I have only scratched the surface of the problems. Zim is a textbook case of how to destroy a national economy by state interference in market mechanisms.