Sir, - Your Editorial of December 5th describes a crisis which your writer ascribes to the land re-distribution carried out by the Mugabe Zanu-PF government using seizures made by ex-combatants. It says that "800 farmers, almost all of them white, are facing destitution".
That may be so, but you must compare that with the 300,000 farm workers who, even when fully employed, earn an average of Zim.$4300 a month in a country where Zim.$19,000 a month is needed for a family with four children. I remember farmers resisting tooth and nail the introduction of a minimum wage in 1980s Zimbabwe. Their argument was that they supplemented the poverty wages they were paying with second-hand clothes and the odd sack of mealie-meal!
There is a very real crisis in Zimbabwe - a crisis common to all third world countries - and it is the systemic, inbuilt, structural neglect of a laissez-faire, freebooting, rampant capitalism. Zimbabwe sells cotton, coffee, tobacco, gold, tea, emeralds and platinum to the developed world. The prices of all of these commodities have fallen in recent years.
Zimbabwe imports machinery, electronics, trucks, oil, spare parts, computers, all of which have risen in price, partly because of currency differences but mainly because of the stranglehold of the developed countries.
Zimbabwe must pay for the latter in American dollars. Where can it get American dollars if the prices for exports are falling? America has recently offered to give aid to Zimbabwe on two conditions: that it accepts election monitors from Europe and calls off land re-distribution. In other words, aid with strings.
Did Europe ask for election monitors for Bush's election in Florida? Should it have? It is time European countries gave the 0.7 per cent of GNP they all promised the United Nations they would devote to aid. But that would not change the structural problems of unequal trade. For that we need an end to the profit-driven system of capitalism.
If Mugabe wins the election next year it will be because of the popularity of land re-distribution. I found on a visit to Zimbabwe last month that while the black population was generally critical of the Mugabe government on other things, on land redistribution they were agreed. - Yours, etc.,
Jim Blake, Grosvenor Mews, Douglas West, Cork