[BlackVeil]

The details you provided about the history of farm settlements are informative. You also mentioned the black farm workers - I saw some interviewed, and they were distressed. They now face chronic unemployment, and along with the white farmers, many have been killed by thugs. What do you want to bet that there is a famine in Zimbabwe within the next decade?

[Clive]

Famine is already incipient.

Zimbabwe was agriculturally self sufficient, a net agrarian exporter.

Now, Zimbabwe needs to import 100,000 tonnes of maize per month but only about 26,000 tonnes is being delivered.

It is autumn in the southern hemisphere. The summer crop was a disaster, caused both by El Niño and by the loss of production caused by the farm invasions.

It looks like there will be no winter crop.

Some of the results of the invasions were:

Turning cattle into standing crops.

Destruction of standing crops by the mobs

Dispersal of the labour force into the bush

Farmers summarily ordered off the land before the crops were harvested.

Destruction of farm infrastructure

Spread of antrhax by breaking down fences separating domestic cattle from wild herds where the disease is endemic.

Spread of hoof-and-mouth disease by moving cattle that ought to have been quarentined.

Destruction of grazing land by arson of the veldt.

[Great Dane]

within the next decade?

Make that the next year, they are already running out of food and asking for help.

[nopardons]

The famine is a month, if not a few weeks away.