Food "production" in Zimbabwe

Washington Post:

Meals come only once a day for Helen Goremusandu, 67, and the six children she is raising. With prices for the most basic food products increasingly beyond her reach, that daily meal often consists of nothing more than boiled pumpkin leaves, washed down with water.

About a mile away, a Zimbabwean government grain mill is churning out a new product: Doggy's Delight. Announced by its creators in January, the high-protein pet food is aimed at the lucrative export market, one of the dwindling sources of foreign exchange in a collapsing economy.

The shift away from making food for humans -- or for pigs, chickens and other animals that humans might eat -- is just one of the more striking distortions in an economy ravaged by government price controls, hyperinflation and a severe food crisis. The World Food Program estimates that 4.1 million Zimbabweans, about one-third of the population, will need food aid this year.

Goremusandu is struggling to raise five grandchildren and one great-grandchild on her monthly salary of 1.8 million Zimbabwean dollars for part-time cleaning work -- worth about 30 cents in U.S. currency at black-market rates. The finely ground cornmeal used in sadza, the boiled white mush that is the nation's staple food, costs 12 million Zimbabwean dollars for an 11-pound bag.

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Zimbabwe's economic devastation has made it difficult even for skilled farmers to get tools, fertilizers and seeds.

David Shumba, whose farm is about 30 miles away on the outskirts of Harare, said he stopped raising thousands of chickens last year because feed had become too hard to find and is thinking about giving up pigs, too. Shumba said he bought 20 tons of water-damaged corn last year to feed them, but hungry farm workers already have stolen a ton of it.

Reaching into a bag of dried corn kernels turning brown from rot, Shumba said, "Stuff like this, people eat now."

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All Zimbabwean farmers by law must sell their corn, wheat and other cereals to the government's Grain Marketing Board, which also imports food for distribution in Zimbabwe.

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The amount of grain that goes into Doggy's Delight is far from enough to alleviate Zimbabwe's chronic food shortages, but news of the product's launch -- along with the criminal allegations against the board executives -- has come to symbolize the Mugabe government's priorities.

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Zimbabwe is a classic example of the failure of command economies where the government control freaks make the decisions on what will be produced and who will do it. It has tried and failed to repeal the alw of supply and demand and the people are paying the price for thsoe failures. It is one of the most incompetently ruled places on Earth.

It is also a demonstration of the misery that is permitted under the Treaty of Westphalia when failed states are permitted to keep incompetent regimes in power and the multilateral framework of the UN and other organizations allows genocide by starvation to continue. Other African governments also bear some responsibility for this mess by continuing to support Mugabe's awful regime.