The Zimbabwean government is reported to have deployed soldiers to control small-scale farming operations across the country.
In the wake of a chilling report by the church-based Solidarity Peace Trust released this week, the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, has warned that militarisation of the sector could kill people in rural areas.
The report alleges that the government has sent troops to control the planting, harvesting and selling of maize, and it expresses the fear that they are poised to confiscate subsistence crops to fill up the state-controlled grain reserves. The move is, among other things, aimed at feeding the increasingly restive armed forces and at persuading the international community that Zimbabwe has adequate food reserves, the report says.
In an interview Ncube said that Bulawayo - a traditional opposition base - had been without maize meal, the nation's staple, for two months.
A year ago, on the eve of Zimbabwe's national election, the outspoken archbishop called on Zimbabweans to rise up and "kick Mugabe out of office". This week he repeated the call, stressing that the country was "leaderless".
Solidarity Peace Trust's report, titled Command Agriculture in Zimbabwe: Its Impact on Rural Communities in Matabeleland, deals in depth with the latest government land policy, "Operation Taguta/Sisuthi", which means "eat well".
On the report's finding that the operation gave the army "effective control over large aspects of agriculture, keeping soldiers who might otherwise get bored and angry at their poor conditions, active and fed", Ncube said the army was not trained in agriculture "so the yield won't be better".
He was disturbed by a recent statement, attributed to Vice-President Joyce Mujuru, calling on people not to sell their harvests but to wait for the military to arrive: "We fear this could mean harvests will be confiscated," Ncube said. "It would kill the people."
Ncube is co-chairperson of the Solidarity Peace Trust, which aims to build social equality and peace in Zimbabwe.
"It makes me feel really powerless," he said. "People just do not know what to do, this government is so pig-headed. They should rise up. Even the army is fed up and the police are fed up. Many of them have fled to South Africa. This government wants to pretend things are not all that bad, but there is no direction."
The latest militarisation of land owned by subsistence farmers, who now produce two-thirds of the country's maize crop, comes in the wake of land grabs by war veterans that Mugabe instituted six years ago.
At a meeting in South Africa this week the trust appealed to global organisations and diplomats to put further pressure on the Mugabe government to end its repressive practices.
Efforts to draw reaction from Mugabe's government on the detailed report were fruitless.
Field workers of the trust, a non-governmental organisation registered in South Africa, found that in a number of areas in Matabeleland, the most underdeveloped province, soldiers had "wantonly and systematically" destroyed established irrigation schemes and fruit and market gardens, "taken custody of early maize harvests" for their own consumption and "beaten farmers" while withholding food. The report says "command agriculture has to be contextualised against a background of the collapse of agriculture since 2000" and the food deficit of the past few years.
"Zimbabwe is becoming increasingly militarised as a state, and the disastrous Operation Murambatsvina ("drive out trash") and Operation Garikai ("live well") were undertaken with the collaboration of the army.
"The army has been in control of food distribution for several years now via control of Grain Marketing Board sales - the only source of affordable maize in rural areas," the report says.
Bishop Rubin Phillip, the Anglican Bishop of KwaZulu-Natal and the other chairperson of the trust, said he had personally seen evidence of the militarisation of subsistence farms.
"We are saying that the government has taken away just about every single right of the Zimbabwean people, and now to take away their right to produce and consume food has got to be the lowest you can go," Phillip said.
It was time for the African Union to take a stand. "And if in the face of this the international community is silent, they have to be seen as being complicit with the Zimbabwe government."