The decline of Rhodesian prosperity from a food exporting nation to the now starving population of Zimbabwe can be tied to one 'TRUTH'.
Government MUST provide secure property rights. No one will invest seed, sweat and money to irrigate or protect crops from marauding birds, without a prayer of reaping the harvest.
This is what starved Russia and this is what is now starving Zimbabwe. Anyone who believes the natives cannot farm every bit as good as the White colonists who were driven off their land is a racist. Its the free market at work in reverse.
Who among us would invest in a crop in Haiti... weed it, fertize it, water it, and generally fend off pests if they do not have a better than 50% chance of reaping the profits of the crop? Once private property rights are eroded (which is happening here, too, by taxation and confiscation), it starts downhill.
The leaders of Zimbabwe now have food to use as a weapon, too. They feed their armies with food aid and they starve their enemies. They take cattle from nomads in Afica and place the nomads in refugee camps because the more refugees you get, the more food aid and governments can make a lot of money taking food and selling it. The more refugees, of course, the more food to plunder.
Nomads who lived on square miles never learned sanitation and many of them die when they pee uphill from the water source.
---Anyone who believes the natives cannot farm every bit as good as the White colonists who were driven off their land is a racist.---
Those "white colonists" were Zimbabwe citizens, most of them born there. It was their country as much as any black's. They are in fact natives of hat place.