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- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
Famine threatens South Africa - and who cares?
10:54 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
6-million South Africans can no longer afford a daily meal warns Operation Hunger
Johannesburg, South Africa. September 15 2008 -- South African maize, wheat, avocados, guavas, macadama and pecan nuts, oranges, lichis - these lavish South African food-supplies have dwindled dramatically and can barely be found any more on the produce markets here -- and now are very expensive.
South African food production is only ten percent of its levels in 1994, when its farmers supplied most of the African continent with affordable staple-foods. For the first time in its agricultural history, this once so self-sufficient African country now has to import massive quantities of food from abroad at a huge cost -- and its food prices have more than tripled over the past two years. http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/1978578/___Brood_moet_goedkoper___.html
This devastating rot set in after SA Pres Thabo Mbeki confiscated the vast majority of the commercial farms where all these fruits, staple-foods and vegetables were being grown over the past 200 years or so.... South Africa's 'white' commercial farmers now have access to less than ONE PERCENT of the entire country's land surface on which they are still allowed to produce any irrigated food-crops like these - according to CIA-satellite observations.
Their numbers have dwindled from 85,000 commercial farmers in 1994 to less than 10,000 this year. More than 1-million South African farm workers have also become jobless and in many cases also homeless, because the 'newly-emergent farmers' have kicked them out of their farm cottages because their tribal family members are used as unpaid labour instead.
For instance, in the Levubu valley in Limpopo, production has been halved over the past two years. These once so productive farms with their many tens of thousands of well-cultivated fruit and nut trees, supplied all the produce markets of South Africa, have been run into wrack and ruin by the inexperienced new black owners. Yet still, the Mbeki-regime denies warnings by Operation Hunger that some 6-million South Africans and 10-million Zimbabweans can't afford a daily meal any more. Food protests are growing in size and violence every day as people are increasingly desperate in their daily search for affordable food....
http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/1921483/__WFP_koopt_recordlading_gerst__.html
LET THEM EAT RATS - There are widespread reports that hungry South Africans are setting veld-fires to capture the rodents and other wildlife so that they can eat every day.Veld-fires have destroyed food crops all over South Africa this month nd killed 36 people in 5 provinces, and were still burning and destroying valuable food-stocks on September 15 2008. The world food-shortages also are growing rapidly, including in India where authorities are urging people to also start eating rats - but while food-shortages are widely publicised in the foreign news media about other countries -- this rapidly-growing famine in South Africa remains a closely-guarded secret, one of those inconvenient, politically-incorrect subjects which the foreign news media doesn't want to write about... http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/1679381/__Rat_kan_voedselcrisis_oplossen__.html http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2375576,00.html
Yet in spite of these growing problems, South Africa's only productive excess-food-producers are still being chased off their well-functioning commercial farms -- under Mbeki's ongoing destruction of the entire agricultural sector.
Willem Pelser, journalist of Rapport newspaper, reported from the Levubu valley in Limpopo on August 1 2008 that this region's fresh-food production for the Gauteng markets has more than halved; that the rural economy has collapsed and that 1,000 farm workers have already lost their jobs -- ever since 55 commercial farmers were 'voluntarily' forced off their lands two years ago to make way for land-claimants who don't have a clue about farming this 'delicate' region.http://www.places.co.za/html/soutpansberg.html http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/1654278/___Voedselhulp_Zimbabwe_hervatten___.html
Pelser interviewed Afrikaner farmers who 'sold up' and those still defiantly hanging onto their land. And these farmers all told him that their beautifully-tended, hugely-productive farms -- which supplied all the produce markets in Gauteng with ten-thirty-ton truckloads of fresh food each week -- now are being ruined at a rapid rate due to the stupidity and willful neglect from the 'new owners'.
Even the foreign news media such as the BBC has become aware of the fact that with the country's commercial farmers now reduced from 85,000 in 1994, to less than 10,000 today (irrigated permanent crops now are farmed on less than one percent of the country's total land surface), South Africa is no longer able to feed itself.
In fact SA produces so little excess food for its own markets that very little gets exported to the rest of Africa these days -- and South Africa moreover, even needs to import vast quantities of food to keep its 47-million-plus population and most of neighbouring Zimbabwe's desperate people fed. South Africa was included on the UN 's World Hunger Map for the very first time in its agricultural history this year.
These soaring food-prices -- due to the local production drops -- also are causing increased social unrest and many more food-robberies are being reported than ever before.
The BBC recently interviewed commercial farmer Theo De Jager of Levubu on the farm he once ran so successfully, producing tons of fresh produce every week. It has been ruined by the new black farmers and nothing whatsoever is produced there now. He told the BBC:'If we want to feed 50 million people in this country, then we need to think differently about land...http://www.til.co.za/trans_limpopo_sdi3.htm
Pictured above is evicted farmer Jan van Wyngaardt on his former and much-loved Limpopo farm Gramadoelas Lodge, which was utterly destroyed, its infrastructure looted by the new black owners within just months. Disillusioned black land-claimants even tended to agree with these Afrikaner farmers: the BBC also interviewed Bernyhard Mojapelo, who said: 'The government was very ambitious with its land reform. But it had no blueprint, it was only a political goal, and it has failed...'
ANC regime's land-grab policy debates in parliament:http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?doc=ancdocs/speeches/2004/sp0608.html
See BBC video clip:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/7493060.stm
Social unrest growing apace: The social fabric of the rural area is also being torn apart, says the local Dutch-Reformed minister of Levubu, Lionel Hartman. They now have to provide welfare-and support services to five times as many people as they did earlier.
Most of these 'redistributed' farms were handed over to the management of the "South African Farm Management company' of Tzaneen - which is an ANC-regime construct. Experienced farmers say this company has so little hands-on management of these wonderful, fertile Levubu farms -- that 'it's looking for trouble.' They use only one farm-worker for every 8 to 10 hectares - whereas previous farmers found that they needed at least one worker every 2 hectares to keep these farms closely supervised. Muller said that 'conservatively estimated' at least 1,000 farm-workers have already lost their jobs in this valley alone -- after the 55 commercial farmers were forced off their land by the Mbeki-regime's laws. http://www.news24.com/Rapport/Nuus/0%2C%2C752-795_2364797%2C00.html
Mass migration of starving Africans: This steadily-encroaching famine threatening South Africa is indeed becoming continent wide - and causing the mass-emigration of thousands of Africans. Europe's southern most countries are experiencing new waves of hunger-refugees from all of Africa, according to the Telegraaf newspaper -- reporting that some 800 African refugees managed to float to the shores of Italy in ramshackle boats today - and that the country's refugee centres are filled to the brim.http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/1595727/__Golf_immigranten_in_Italie__.html
Let them eat bubonic rats? --
The Indian solution - to let the population eat rats -- might even work in South Africa where poor people often eat rats and other rodents and where there's also a huge rat-plague: except that so many SA rats are infected with the deadly bubonic-plague bacterium.
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