Zimbabwe Won't Let Farmers Grow Food

Because the farmers are white.

The Telegraph (UK) reported Saturday on the latest trouble for white farmers in Zimbabwe.

Ten white farmers appeared in court in Zimbabwe yesterday accused of growing crops on their land — in a country where millions of people will need food aid within the next few months.

The case in Chegutu district, 70 miles southwest of Harare, exposes the perversity of President Robert Mugabe's policies. Commerical agriculture was the mainstay of the economy in the days when Zimbabwe was a food exporter.

Now the Chegutu group is charged with violating the Consequential Provisions Act, which gave the few hundred remaining white farmers a final deadline of Sep 30 to leave their land and homes.

The farmers, aged from 38 to 75, produce a variety of food from chickens to oranges and have already given two-thirds of their farms to the government for resettlement. All but one still work their remaining land intensively and say they intend to try to continue.

Didymus Mutasa, the lands minister, has said that the few hundred remaining white farmers will be forced out, one way or another.

"The position is that food shortages or no food shortages, we are going ahead to remove the remaining whites," he said recently. "Too many blacks are still clamouring for land and we will resettle them on the remaining farms."

Outside the court, the scruffy shops of Chegutu were empty of basic foods, and street vendors sold small, sour oranges.

They came from a once-prolific citrus farm in the district now devastated after it was seized by Bright Matonga, the deputy information minister, earlier this year.

Zimbabwe's people are starving--but, of course, not President Robert Mugabe or his cronies--because the farms are no longer in the hands of people who know how to make them produce food. Annual inflation is over 6,000%. And Mugabe doesn't give a rat's a$$ for the welfare of his nation or its citizens, or he wouldn't keep pursuing his ethnic purge of Zimbabwe's farms.

Mugabe deserves the Putting Marie Antoinette to Shame Award. But even more than that, he deserves to be purged from the country he's hell-bent on destroying.

Who will stop him? The UN?