WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2002-10-15 Posted By: Jan
From the News Archives of: WWW.AfricanCrisis.Org
Date & Time Posted: 10/15/2002 4:30:54 PM
Zimbabwe"s Tattered Economy
Harare.
Nearly three years of rural instability has badly damaged Zimbabwe’s crucial tobacco harvest, with the country likely to sell only a fraction of the tobacco it did in 2000, producers said on Tuesday.
The plunge in sales of tobacco, the nation’s top hard currency earner, will further damage an already withering economy suffering from runaway inflation and unemployment of nearly 60%. Net earnings from tobacco were likely to drop from US$400-million in 2000, before the government began its program to seize white-owned commercial farms, to $105-million next year, said Oliver Gawe, representative for the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association.
Tobacco traditionally accounts for more than 30% of the country’s hard currency earnings, vital for purchasing fuel and corn needed to stave off a hunger crisis that threatens more than half the nation’s population. In a paper presented to Parliament last week, Gawe said that “handled properly, tobacco exports could easily pay for the country’s fuel needs.”
But the government’s controversial land redistribution program was badly damaging the industry, he said. The government was evicting nearly 5 000 white families from commercial farms so the land could be redistributed to hundreds of thousands of black Zimbabweans.
Those former commercial farms would produce only 10-million kilograms of Virginia flue-cured tobacco next year, compared to 150-million kilograms in 2000, Gawe said.
Over 6 000 small-scale farmers produced 25-million kilograms this season, relying heavily on large-scale commercial growers for assistance with seedlings and curing, he said.
Gawe rejected government claims that the 300 000 black Zimbabweans to be resettled on the land could speedily restore production levels. “From our experience dealing with smallholder farmers, it takes five to six seasons for a farmer to master the crop and get the quality right,” he said.
President Robert Mugabe has said his land reform program was an effort to correct colonial imbalances that left a handful of whites with one-third of the nation’s farmland. Human rights workers, opposition officials and foreign diplomats say Mugabe has used the land issue as an excuse to wage a violent political war against the opposition and shore up his plummeting popularity amid the economic crisis.
The private Daily News newspaper reported on Tuesday 180 families of black farm workers were forced to sleep outside near the city of Bulawayo, after ruling party militants evicted them from the flower farm where they had worked. Rights groups say more than 100 000 former farm workers and their families are battling homelessness and unemployment. Less than 10% of the workers, many of whom were opposition supporters, received plots of land under the redistribution
program, rights workers said.
Meanwhile, white commercial farmer Roy Bennett and a Zimbabwean-born British citizen, Stewart Girvin, were to appear in court on Tuesday in the remote rural town of Chimanimani on charges they videotaped Mugabe voters being given corn during recent local elections.
Bennett, an opposition legislator, and Girvin could be charged either with violating election laws by entering the vicinity of polling stations without official permission, or with working as journalists without accreditation, police representative Wayne Bvudzijena said.
Also, a sporadic strike by some of the nation’s 80 000 teachers continued on Tuesday despite the government’s dismissal of 627 striking teachers on Monday and the arrest last week of union leader, Raymond Majongwe.
Majongwe, released on bail, faces up to 10 years in jail on charges he organised an illegal labor action. – Sapa-AP
Date: 15 October 2002 14:06
Source: Daily Mail & Guardian
URL: http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.jsp?a=37&o=105…br>