Our Racist Demonology

The most evil man on earth, besides Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, is Robert Mugabe, the president ofZimbabwe. That, at least, is the view of most of the western world's press.

Yesterday Mugabe insisted that 2,900 white farmers will have to leave their land. He claims to beredistributing their property to landless peasants, but many of the farms he has seized have been handedinstead to army officers and party loyalists. Twelve white farmers have been killed and many others beaten. Hestole the elections in March through ballot rigging and the intimidation of his political rivals. His assaulton white-owned farms has been cited by the Daily Telegraph as the principal reason for the current famine.Now, the paper maintains, he is using "food aid as a political weapon". As a candidate for the postof World's Third Most Evil Man, he appears to possess all the right credentials.

There is no doubt that Mugabe is a ruthless man, or that his policies are contributing to the furtherimpoverishment of the Zimbabweans. But to suggest that his land seizures are largely responsible for thenation's hunger is fanciful. Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of the best land, many ofthem grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize -- its primary staple crop -- is grownby black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedynow playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave theirland, with devastating consequences for food security. For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of alast visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of thepress as the necessary casualties of development.

Ten years ago, I investigated the expropriations being funded and organised in Africa by another member ofthe Commonwealth. Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania.Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans orcassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders inwheat technology. The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those whotried to return to their lands were beaten by the project's workers, imprisoned and tortured with electricshocks. The women were gang-raped. For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When Iraised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me, "I won't shed a tear foranybody if it means development."

The rich world's press took much the same attitude: only the Guardian carried the story. Now yet anothermember of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of AndhraPradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of themedia.

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people.They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabeis a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

Throughout the coverage of Zimbabwe there is an undercurrent both of racism and of regret that Britain everlet Rhodesia go. Some of the articles in the Telegraph may as well have been headlined "The plucky menand women holding darkest Africa at bay". Readers are led to conclude that Ian Smith was right all along:the only people who know how to run Africa are the whites.

But, through the IMF, the World Bank and the bilateral aid programmes, with their extraordinary conditions,the whites do run Africa, and a right hash they are making of it. Over the past ten years, according the theUN's latest human development report, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than a dollara day has risen from 242 to 300 million. The more rigorously Africa's governments apply the policies demandedby the whites, the poorer their people become.

Just like Mugabe, the rich world has also been using "food aid as a political weapon". The UnitedStates has just succeeded in forcing Zimbabwe and Zambia, both suffering from the southern African famine, toaccept GM maize as food relief. Both nations had fiercely resisted GM crops, partly because they feared thatthe technology would grant multinational companies control over the foodchain, leaving their people still morevulnerable to hunger. But the US, seizing the opportunity for its biotech firms, told them that they musteither accept this consignment or starve.

Malawi has also been obliged to take GM maize from the US, partly because of the loss of its own strategicgrain reserve. In 1999, the IMF and the European Union instructed Malawi to privatise the reserve. The privatebody was not capitalised, so it had to borrow from commercial banks to buy grain. Predictably enough, by 2001it found that it couldn't service its debt. The IMF told it to sell most of the reserve. The private body soldit all, and Malawi ran out of stored grain just as its crops failed. The IMF, having learnt nothing from thiscatastrophe, continues to prevent that country from helping its farmers, subsidising food or stabilisingprices.

The same agency also forces weak nations to open their borders to subsidised food from abroad, destroyingtheir own farming industries. Perhaps most importantly, it prevents state spending on land reform. Landdistribution is the key determinant of food security. Small farms are up to ten times as productive as largeones, as they tend to be cultivated more intensively. Small farmers are more likely to supply local peoplewith staple crops than western supermarkets with mangetout.

The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends thegod of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies which supply them. Indeed, it was Britain'srefusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in Zimbabwe which created the politicalopportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the blackpeople but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The saintedNelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to theIMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid. Let us condemn Mugabe's racist attacks upon Zimbabwe'swhites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war which the rich worldwages against the poor.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK