Farmers told to stop farming

last updated 8 January 2015

Harare, Zimbabwe

President Robert Mugabe has ordered the country’s 3,000 white farmers to surrender their farmland so it can be given to blacks. Though a tiny minority, whites own most of the arable land in Zimbabwe, and Mugabe has made land redistribution his pet issue—largely to distract the people from his killing of hundreds of black opposition supporters. Now, with a famine spreading across the country, he has decreed jail sentences for whites caught tending their crops. “It’s now a crime to produce food for my country at a time when the masses are starving,” rancher Mike Clark told the London Independent. “What a mess.”