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Posted on 07/28/2002 7:27:40 PM PDT by Clive
The drought in southern Africa could become a catastrophe because of Zimbabwe's refusal to allow commercial imports of grain to enable better-off Zimbabweans to feed themselves, Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, warned yesterday.
She said 106 world leaders, including Tony Blair, attending next month's Earth Summit in Johannesburg, could find their attempts to address the effects of poverty on the world's environment overshadowed by a famine which was at least partly man-made.
In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, she said the worst drought in southern Africa for 10 years was capable of becoming "a catastrophe" because of the conduct of Robert Mugabe's ruling regime in Zimbabwe.
The World Food Programme has reported that two-thirds of the 3.2 million tons of food which is now needed in Zimbabwe could be provided by commercial means - that is bought by people who could afford it.
More than half the people at risk from the famine are in Zimbabwe, where seizures of white-owned farms by "war veterans" and members of the ruling Zanu-PF party have devastated agricultural output. Reports, confirmed at the weekend, showed that water is available in dams but is not being used.
Miss Short said she had volunteered not to go to the Johannesburg summit, which is estimated to be using the same amount of energy as nearly half a million Africans would use in a year. But she was prevailed on to attend, along with a delegation of 70 ministers and officials including John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, because of her close links with developing countries.
Miss Short warned western environmentalists like Friends of the Earth that it would be "immoral" if their concerns about globalisation were to derail an agreement that could help the 2.4 billion people without proper sanitation over the next 15 years.
"Poor countries want multinationals. They want modern telecommunications. They want water and sanitation systems. Of course multinationals can be irresponsible, but they supply the modern technology of the world," she said.
She also praised big companies who were becoming more aware of their responsibilities towards the populations of developing countries. "If the Johannesburg summit went wrong we would have a nasty international atmosphere," she concluded.
Success, however, would provide "a united international endeavour to deliver what has to be delivered if our kids and our grandchildren are going to have any kind of decent Earth to live on".
Um... hello?? McFly???? HELLLOOOO????
They have water in the dams, but they're holding it back and not using it. They have plenty of farmers, but they first forbid them from farming, then actively run them off the farms. Then they hand over all the confiscated farms to those who have neither the skill nor the character to farm them. They have offers of food aid from the west, but they either refuse them or make certain they are only distributed to Mugabe's cronies.
And these people say "a famine which was at least partly man-made???"
Surely I'm not the only person who sees that what is happening here is a carefully planned program of Mugabe-engineered genocide of the Zimbabwean people?
Zim is going through a period of reduced rainfall, which makes a geat excuse for Mugabe.
Reduced rainfall, drought if you will, is a cyclical occurrance which can be anticipated and planned for by commercial agriculture and my competent agriculture ministries.
The North American prairies are going through a drought but there is no famine.
The Zim farm invasions resulted in crops not being planted and crops which had been planted not being irrigated.
As a result, the dams are full of the water that ought to have been used to irrigate maize crops in the summer just past and wheat crops in the present winter.
ZWNews has a document in doc format which can be downloaded by going to this page:
http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=4591
The document shows green fields right next to brown fields, the green fields are commercial farm land which has not yet been invaded and the brown ones are the ones occupied by squatters.
This is a drought that starts and stops at boundary fences.
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