[stop-imf] Monbiot: War on the Peasantry

[Robert Weissman]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,773596,00.html

War on the peasantry

Mugabe's crimes pale next to what black small farmers endure in the name
of development

George Monbiot
Tuesday August 13, 2002
The Guardian

The most evil man on earth, after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, is
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of
most of the western world's press.

Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave
their land. He claims to be redistributing their property to landless
peasants, but many of the farms he has seized have been handed instead
to army officers and party loyalists. Twelve white farmers have been
killed and many others beaten. He stole the elections in March through
ballot-rigging and the intimidation of his political rivals.

His assault on white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph
as the principal reason for the current famine. Now, the paper
maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". As a candidate
for the post of World's Third Most Evil Man, he appears to possess all
the right credentials.

There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies
are contributing to the further impoverishment of the Zimbabweans. But
to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for the
nation's hunger is fanciful.

Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of of the best land,
many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's
maize - its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers
hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is
merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world.
Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave
their land, with devastating consequences for food security.

For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the
graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are
dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of
development.

Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and
organised in Africa by another member of the Commonwealth. Canada had
paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in
Tanzania.

Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that
crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure
contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world
leaders in wheat technology.

The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the
Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by
the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The
women were gang-raped.

For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I
raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told
me: "I won't shed a tear for anybody if it means development." The rich
world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the
story.

Now yet another member of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is
funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some
20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been
ignored by most of the media.

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than
whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their
rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects.
Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent of racism
and of regret that Britain ever let Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in
the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky men and women
holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian
Smith was right all along: the only people who know how to run Africa
are the whites.

But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programmes,
with their extraordinary conditions, the whites do run Africa, and a
right hash they are making of it.

Over the past 10 years, according to the UN's latest human development
report, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a
dollar a day has risen from 242 million to 300 million. The more
rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demanded by the
whites, the poorer their people become.

Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a
political weapon". The United States has just succeeded in forcing
Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, to
accept GM maize as food relief.

Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared
that the technology would grant multinational companies control over the
foodchain, leaving their people still more vulnerable to hunger. But the
US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they
must either accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly
because of the loss of its own strategic grain reserve. In 1999, the IMF
and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatise the reserve.

The private body was not capitalised, so it had to borrow from
commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001 it found that
it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the
reserve.

The private body sold it all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as
its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from this catastrophe,
continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidising
food or stabilising prices.

The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to
subsidised food from abroad, destroying their own farming industries.
Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform.

Land distribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms
are up to 10 times as productive as large ones, as they tend to be
cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply
local people with staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires
state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts
big farmers and the companies that supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's
refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in
Zimbabwe that created the political opportunities Mugabe has so
ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to
the black population but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates
the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics
of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as
much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF
as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid.

Let us condemn Mugabe's attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but
only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war that the
rich world wages against the poor.