Famines are often political in that while true crop failure do happen and people have died throughout the ages in large numbers, in modern times due to advances in farming, they are often allowed to happen and worsened for political ideologies. This was also true in the past at times too. The Irish Potato Famine, for example, was caused by a true blight on the Irish Lumper potato, but was worsened by English policies that forced the expropriation of what little food the Irish were able to farm, and then in combination with certain English thinkers, some of them Protestant Christians who believed that relief for the Famine should not be permitted or limited because they believed that it was sent from God to the Irish to ‘teach them a lesson’, resulted in the deaths of over a million people by starvation and the Irish Diaspora to the US. The Holodomor in Ukraine was caused by Stalinist policies executed under the Jewish Communist bureaucrat Gengrikh Yagoda that functioned in a similar way to the English policies against the Irish, except this time it involved outright executions and between 8 to 12 million died of starvation.
The tiny southern African nation of Zimbabwe has seen many periods of starvation, largely engineered by the now deceased dictator Robert Mugabe. Prior to the ascent of the USSR-supported Mugabe, Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, was a net food producer and exporter.
According to recent reports, Zimbabwe is close to having another famine.
Zimbabwe is on the brink of man-made starvation, a UN official has warned.
More than 60% of the country’s 14 million people are considered food-insecure, according to the findings.
Hyperinflation, poverty, natural disasters and economic sanctions were among the identified causes.
Women and children were “bearing the brunt of the crisis” with 90% of children aged six months to two years not consuming enough food.
Hilal Elver, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, reported her findings following an 11-day visit to the country.
“I cannot stress enough the urgency of the situation in Zimbabwe,” she said, adding that the crisis continues to worsen.
She said many of the people she met could only afford one meal a day and that most of the children she met were stunted and underweight.
“The harrowing stories I heard from resilient grandmothers, mothers or aunts desperately trying to save their children from starvation, in the midst of their daily hardships, will remain with me.” (source)
Right now, Zimbabwe is caught in the geopolitical range of the US and her allies against the Chinese, the latter which is attempting to build up her presence in that nation because of her natural supplies of Platinum, platinum-derived elements (those which occur naturally alongside and are often mined in smaller quantities with traditional Platinum mining), and Chromium, all of which China needs in order to develop her war machine. The US relies heavily on South Africa for her Platinum needs, and the growing Chinese presence in that region is a threat to her interests that she has been working to stand against. Likewise, the Russians have also intervened on behalf of the Chinese but not as a friend, only to give the appearance of friendship, and more so to interrupt American plans there, as an extension of the Soviet “Maximum-Minimum” strategy conceived during the 1970s and which was used with great efficaciousness in Africa.
Humanitarian aid is good, but many times, “humanitarian aid” is given for purposes that are less than human, which is geopolitical manipulation.
We know for a fact that there are serious food wars going on right now between the US and China. The “soybean war” has depressed soy prices as China has been attempting to buy most of her crop from South America to attempt to undercut the US market, and a curiously-timed pig illness has already killed off one-quarter of the world’s pig population and threatens to decimate major market share of what is left in the major pork-producing nations of Germany and Denmark.
Could a foreign power be behind helping to worsen the food security problem in Zimbabwe? It cannot be definitively proven at the time, but it certainly is a possibility that must be considered.
For now, it is rather to watch what will happen in that nation, and to see what the response from the western powers will be. There has been a lot of silent changes taking place in Zimbabwe following the death of Mugabe, including the return of many farmers of European stock to their African homeland, as they were expelled from their lands and their belongings confiscated under Mugabe’s racist policies. There is much hope, but also much uncertainty.
Was the current famine, which has turned the world-famous Victoria Falls from a rushing river to a tricking stream, a purely natural phenomenon, or was it “helped” by man, and what will this mean for the future of the nation, especially how it concerns her vast mining resources?
It is to be seen.