By Peta Thornycroft
Zimbabwe's minister of the environment, Francis Nhema, controversially elected on Friday to head the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development, seized a productive farm that has now become a virtual desert.
The 1 000ha farm, Nyamanda, in the Karoi district about 200km north of Harare, used to produce 100ha of maize, 100ha of tobacco and supported a top-class animal husbandry unit of beef cattle, pigs and sheep.
Farmer Chris Shepherd believes he still owns the farm, as he has not been paid for his confiscated property, along with 90 percent of white farmers evicted during Zimbabwe's farm-seizure campaign.
He flew low over Nyamanda a few weeks ago to check on the highly developed land, which had supported his own family and more than 250 permanent workers and their families and another 250 contract workers during the season.
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"There was about 30ha of appalling maize which will produce nothing," he said this week. "It hasn't been irrigated. Nhema rents out some of my land to a couple of white farmers still in the district.
"There is nothing else. The place looks dreadful. Two of the tobacco barns which burned down after Nhema moved in have not been rebuilt. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the destruction.
"Within two years of leaving in 2002, at least 30 percent of male workers on the farm had died [from illness and malnutrition] and only about 10 of them are still there. The workers on our old farms have suffered terribly."
Many of the farm workers taken on by Mugabe's cronies regularly report to the General, Agricultural and Plantation Workers of Zimbabwe that they are grossly underpaid by their new employers.
"You must speak to my farm manager about anything related to the farm," Nhema said in New York.
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