Zimbabwe doomed to another failed harvest

The road west from Harare leads through some of the most fertile land in southern Africa. The December rains are watering the plains and anything planted now should bear a bountiful harvest.

But nothing is being planted. There are no tractors making their way through what should be a sea of winter wheat seedlings.

These fields that once fed an entire region of Africa no longer feed even the country itself.

Through no act of God, Zimbabwe's new year harvest has already failed. The commercial farmers are gone and in their place wasted children scavenge by the roadside for kernels of corn that fall from passing trucks and can be picked out from the asphalt.

The United Nations has found that more than two-thirds of Zimbabweans are living on one meal, or less, per day.

The starvation that has been stalking the country for much of this decade now claims victims every day; the prospect of an unprecedented famine looms next year.

Estimates of those in need of emergency food aid have been revised up from four million to 5.5 million in the past month. Child malnutrition has shot up by two-thirds in some areas of the country in the past year, according to Save the Children.

Zimbabwe's food comes, when it does come, by road: either emergency shipments of maize meal from the UN's World Food Programme or family remittances packed with loving care into the overloaded minibuses, which make up the lifeline to South Africa.

Brian (not his real name), formerly a senior official in Zimbabwe's Commercial Farmers' Union, estimates that only 5 per cent of the food production that peaked in the early 1980s, during Robert Mugabe's honeymoon with the white farmers, now remains.

The sophisticated agricultural sector that formed the backbone of the economy has been "stripped for parts", the irrigation systems destroyed, machinery and storehouses dismantled, he adds. Even if power were to change hands today, farming would take "more than five years" to recover.

Agriculture needs "inputs", he says, and it needs that at the right time. But the planning and know-how have been systematically dismantled. "This will be by far the worst harvest," Brian says. This sector was the one that Mr Mugabe, when he was a guerrilla leader, was famously warned by Mozambique's President Samora Machel not to destroy, otherwise "you will face ruin".

He heeded that advice, until it was expedient after 2000 to cash in the commercial farms to shore up his political base. The farms, almost all white-owned, were seized and after much anti-colonial posturing the lion's share of them was handed out to his cronies for them to treat as their playgrounds.

Since then farmland and food have been used as weapons to starve Mr Mugabe's enemies and enrich his allies. The country is in ruins, but the ruling clique is still in power.

A power-sharing deal that was signed under intense outside pressure in September has been revealed as a political feint. No meaningful authority has been offered to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change despite their parliamentary majority. As the year draws to a close there is stalemate and starvation. "The tragedy of this country is that he is insensitive to the plight of our people," says Nelson Chamisa, the spokesman for the MDC. "All this is happening for the sake of one man, and an old man at that."

Delivery of vital supplies of seeds, fuel and fertiliser from international donors was conditional on the formation of a unity government. The government faces a year-end deadline from Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC's leader, to release at least 42 abducted opposition activists or he will walk away from power-sharing talks. There is no sign of movement. Instead several of the abductees have been paraded through the courts and accused of plotting a coup.

"This is a dictatorship, a place where people's rights are forfeit and where people even have to forfeit their lives," Mr Chamisa says. "Next year will again be a year of hunger. Again we are reliant on outside help and if we have a government at war with the international community then that goodwill cannot be relied upon."

There are already signs that international donors are reluctant to commit funds without a change of political leadership. Save the Children warned this week that there is already a shortfall of 18,000 tonnes of food aid for January.

When talking about the corruption that has consumed the country since independence, Zimbabweans often fall back on the proverb that explains the endless greed of the regime: "You never finish eating the meat of an elephant". But there are increasing signs that this elephant's bones were picked clean in 2008. Each sector, from mining to manufacturing and flower farming, has been looted completely. With a cholera epidemic raging, the economy by default now using the dollar, analysts believe Zimbabwe may be hitting the bottom.

Outside Chitungwiza, nearly 20 miles from the capital, Patience is typical of the women working at what now passes for farming here.

She hoes the young elephant grass by the roadside, ignoring the stench of raw sewage that trickles along a ditch from the township. "I have no seeds," she says, so she plants sweet potatoes. This is not even subsistence farming as her ragged patch will not feed her three children for any length of time, and she may not survive to harvest it.

Patience is already exceptional in that she is 35. The life expectancy for women here is 33, the lowest in the world, and down from 57 at independence in 1980. Her skin is flaking, her ankles swollen and her face is drawn and hollow: all clear signs of malnutrition. Last week, she waited for days at a school for international food handouts that never came.

So she is left to hoe the banks of a sewage ditch. "I have to do something," she explains.

Some names in this piece have been changed to protect identities