I heard a story on Zimbabwe on NPR a couple of weeks ago. Apparently there is a food shortage, where before the farms were taken from the white farmers they had plenty. The journalist, who gave up her British citizenship to stay in her home country, said that operating a large farm is a lot different from growing stuff in a small plot. She said that the white farmers ‘made it look easy’. Not a racial thing of course, but an issue of training and education.
Is anyone familiar with the situation in Zimbabwe? Are there any resources to help the new farmers make the farms they’ve been given (more) productive?
There really aren’t any resources available to them. Essentially, Robert Mugabe took a bunch of large, sophisticated farms from the evil rich white folk and handed them over to a large group of people with no money, little education, and no agricultural skills. As the journalist points out, growing vegetables in your garden is one thing, but running a gigantic, modern, mechanized farm requires a great deal of training and education. They don’t know how to use the machinery. They don’t know how to use the fertilizers and pesticides. They don’t know how to test soil chemistry and even if they did, they wouldn’t know what the results meant. They don’t know how to mechanically harvest crops – apparently Mr. Mugabe thinks you can achieve the same yields picking stuff by hand.
As I pointed out in a previous thread, the US developed an entire system of Universities whose primary job was for educating farmers. It’s not surprising we produce far more food than we could ever eat. And we’re pretty damn fat, too.
As a side issue, much of the capital which went into the matter is probably all wasted by now. Machinery rusts if its not taken care of, and all the farm equipment more complicated a hoe has probably rusted to death, been sold off to other countries, or has been stripped for spare parts. Moreover there’s now no money for fuel to run them.
And of course, the irrigation is probably falling to pieces. It needs maintenance too. And the grain silos. Shipping and transporation stock is falling apart, no doubt, since no one can use it. Even if the farms somehow produced enough to feed everyone, it probably couldn’t be moved to the hungry (the Confederacy had this problem in the Civil War).
Short version: this is a total and sadly not-at-all-unprecedented disaster.