In one of the ongoing travesties of human life the country of Zimbabwe wants back its white farmers.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/zimbabwe-offers-land-to-recompense-dispossessed-white-farmersAmazingly written up in Bloomberg whose jerk namesake thinks farming is just putting seeds in the ground (or so he claimed during his campaign to the chagrin of my farming background).
The problem/solution has nothing to do with "white". Robert Mugabe encouraged chasing out all white people in a bid to right historical colonial wrongs. Maybe even a noble goal but he shut out centuries of experience. You can't replace a farmer who knows the land with a farmer who doesn't. Race has nothing to do with it.
We all know the fall of Zimbabwe. Runaway inflation, starvation, and what once was a jewel of Africa languished. But the farmers are gone. The knowledge is gone. It's almost a generation gone.
The sad thing is that the real victims are the average people of Zimbabwe. To have the government in 20 years swing from fomenting revolution to come crawling back means life must be rough. They're obviously looking for anyone to put the pieces back together and I hope they do. But that's a track record I wouldn't want to be tasked with walking back.
It's a sad economic lesson we somehow need to keep learning. People who are specialized and can make great things happen need to left to their task. Farming is no exception. You can't replace years of experience with an upstart. My heart goes out to those who have suffered this policy which yields the gravest of human conditions: starvation.
