Re: John Savard Watch the Funny Man!
To me, it looks like 'traditional black farming' is just Mugabe's cover story. He's deliberately crippled agriculture (usually, when the farms get taken over they're gifted to one of his cronies and asset-stripped) and the monetary system in order to keep the populace weak and create a dependence on his regime.
Food scarcity ensures that people spend much more of their efforts on acquiring their next meal and less on things that might be detrimental to the regime a la the Ministry of Plenty and (this is a pretty wild guess) imported food should be easier to control the distribution of than locally-grown stuff, ensuring that regions with more Mugabe supporters get fed better.
Hyperinflation can also be worked to an advantage. The moment a trillion-Zimbabwean Dollar note is printed it starts to lose buying power. The older that note is, the less you can buy with it. This means that the people closest to the mint (Mugabe's followers) are automatically wealthier than people further away from it, thus creating a dependence on the Mugabe Bunch.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
