Zimbabwe's Coming Famine

Organizations that follow African agricultural situation are alarmed by Zimbabwe's rising food prices. 

Seasonal livelihood strategies continue to be constrained mainly as a result of poor 2018/19 harvests, worsening economic challenges, and decreasing water availability and access, especially in arid areas, limiting household incomes. Agricultural and non-agricultural casual labor opportunities are very limited as better-off households have no or limited resources to pay for the labor. In-country and international remittances mainly from South Africa are below average.  As cash shortages continue, the use of mobile money has increased in both rural and urban areas is eroding disposable incomes owing to high service charges or rates.

The world is taking for granted that African nations will periodically suffer food supply crisis and need help to feed themselves. But Zimbabwe is a farmer's paradise and its inability to grow food is not "normal". A generation ago it was exporting food in quantities. Who destroyed Zimbabwe? I for one remember and know. It was the British left wing anticolonial movement of the eighties. They were (and are!) so sanctimonious and high-minded. They attacked the farmers under the illusion that they were expropriating what Nature was giving, not working hard in the middle of dangerous and unhealthy Africa. They were totally disconnected from reality. Thinking about the intellectuals general disdain for reality, I realize that Mao's policy of sending millions of students and academic workers to the countryside  to learn how and by whom their food was being produced, was justified. Mao was no peasant but had a clear idea of reality and may have been shocked by the emergence of the new class of Communist intelligentsia. May be the English Left needed to spend a few years in Africa to connect with its reality. That would have avoided the coming famine in Zimbabwe.