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Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe: Mugabe admits chaotic land reforms to blame for food shortages

HARARE - President Robert Mugabe at the weekend admitted that his chaotic and often violent land redistribution exercise helped cause severe food shortages in Zimbabwe.
Mugabe has in the past completely rejected assertions that his seizure of large-scale producing white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks destabilised the mainstay agricultural sector and Zimbabwe's capacity to feed itself.

Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket, has since Mugabe's land reforms in 2000 largely survived on handouts from international food relief agencies.

The Zimbabwean leader, who insists his land reforms were necessary to correct an unjust land tenure system that reserved all the best farmland for whites while blacks were cramped on poor soils, had in the past maintained that his country's food problems were mainly because of poor weather.

But Mugabe last Saturday told a conference of his ruling ZANU PF party that lack of proper planning in the land reform exercise, corruption, lawlessness on farms and vandalisation of irrigation equipment and infrastructure, coupled with shortages of fertilizer and seed had exacerbated the effects of poor weather.

"All this translates into low production and food insecurity," said Mugabe, in a surprisingly frank assessment of his land reform project.

Indicating he is not about to call off ongoing seizures of the few farms still in white hands, Mugabe told the ZANU PF conference that there were still more people waiting to be allocated land. But he said vandalisation of farms should stop.

"We still have people in need of land. We have to stop vandalisation on farms. All irrigation badly needs to be rehabilitated," Mugabe said.

Mugabe's farm seizures, which he launched a year after the International Monetary Fund withdrew balance-of-payments support to his government, knocked Zimbabwe's agriculture-based economy completely off the rails, triggering a severe recession that has been described by the World Bank as unprecedented in a country not at war.

The economic crisis has seen inflation shooting beyond 500 percent, while unemployment is above 70 percent. Fuel, electricity, essential medical drugs and just about every basic survival commodity is in critical short supply because there is no hard cash to pay foreign suppliers.

The United Nations (UN) World Food Programme says by end of January, it will be providing food aid to about three million Zimbabweans or a quarter of the country's 12 million people.

But Mugabe and ZANU PF used their conference to heap scorn on UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland who toured Zimbabwe last week and described humanitarian conditions in the country as very serious and worsening by the day.

Mugabe and his party accused the UN envoy of exaggerating Zimbabwe's humanitarian situation with the 81-year old President calling the UN envoy a hypocrite and liar.

The ZANU PF conference urged Mugabe's government to crack down on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civic groups allied to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which the party claims are being sponsored by Britain and its Western allies to topple the Harare government.

The ruling party also called on immigration authorities to step up seizure of travel documents from citizens opposed to Mugabe's rule so they cannot travel abroad to mobilise international pressure against the government.

Zimbabwe immigration officials have in the past week seized the passport of top journalist and publisher Trevor Ncube and MDC official, Paul Themba Nyathi, who they said were among a list of 64 people whose passports must be impounded.

Ncube is expected to appeal to the High Court today against the seizure of his passport.