Obert Gadzi reports that ‘people in the countryside can barely feed themselves as crops fail for the sixth successive year’. This article for Africa Reports states that ‘according to aid workers, the shortage is worst in rural areas where vulnerable people are eating less than one meal a day on average, and schools are appealing for food for their hungry pupils’.

The blame can be placed on the Mugabe’s ZANU PF government’s notorious Fast Track Land Reform Programme, which when it began in 2000 involved the mass invasion of commercial farms by so-called veterans of the 1970s liberation war and landless peasants, marked also the beginning of the agricultural industry’s collapse.

After more than 4,000 commercial farmers were driven from their properties, the initial invaders were themselves pushed from the farms, which were redistributed to members of President Mugabe’s family, government ministers, top ZANU PF party officials, senior army, air force and police officials, and compliant judges and journalists.

Few of the “new farmers” are producing crops. In a rare admission of government failure, Deputy Agriculture Minister Sylvester Nguni said they lacked the skills to produce on what he called a “commercial or even subsistence level”.