The situation in Zimbabwe
Austin Bay has a wonderful examination of the problems in Zimbabwe at
Strategy Page:
Tragedy in Zimbabwe
The government's own inflation data put the inflation rate at 7,600 percent a year. Economic analysts outside of Zimbabwe think it may be even higher, 8,500 percent to perhaps as high as 15,000 percent. An IMF "forecast" says the real rate could reach 100,000 percent. Boggling? It's beyond boggling. All of these figures are so large that in terms of policy �and poverty-- the statistical differences are meaningless. Recently a Zimbabwean government official admitted that the real inflation rate is "incalculable" because there are so few goods available in the country. Staples like meat, bread and cooking oil are not available in retail grocery stores. Gasoline (except for government officials and friends of the ruling ZANU-PF party) disappeared many months ago.
A statistic that really does matter is unemployment. No one really knows what the unemployment rate is in Zimbabwe. Visit the Web and you will find estimates from fifty to eighty percent. As always, you have to ask not only who did the survey but what constitutes employment. Zimbabwe's once flourishing tourist industry has all but disappeared. In 1999, 1.4 million tourists visited Zimbabwe. Now there are no tourists. An estimated 200,000 Zimbabweans once worked in a tourism-related job (hotels, restaurants, etc.). Almost everyone agrees, however, that commercial agriculture jobs are (or were) a key component in Zimbabwe's economy. Since 2000, Zimbabwe has lost between 250,000 and 400,000 jobs in its once productive agricultural sector. In 2003 the UN reported approximately 100,000 farm workers were still employed on commercial farms. That was a decrease of 250,000 from an estimated 350,000 workers employed by commercial farms in 2000 prior to president Mugabe's first "land redistribution" program, his "agrarian revolution" called the "Third Chimurenga," or "liberation struggle." The vast majority of those farms were owned by whites. The Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union reported that there were approximately 4,500 white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe in 2000. The higher agricultural worker job loss figure is based a recent estimate, which means it is a very iffy statistic, like Zimbabwe's actual inflation rate. In 2000 the UN estimated that the 350,000 farm workers supported roughly two million people. Using the same ratio (5.7 per worker) that means 2.28 million people who once had well-paying jobs (by Zimbabwean standards) now have little or no income. That is out of a 2005 population of around 13 million people. Many of these once well-employed remain "living on the land" as squatters or "tenant farmers without rights." They do grow some crops but their situation is "hand to mouth," meaning they are now subsistence farmers. These Zimbabweans have effectively lost a century's worth of economic development. Indeed, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe has taken what should be one of Africa's wealthiest countries and turned it into an economic and political wasteland.
Lots more at Strategy Page including some good reasons why other African states are not clamoring for Mugabe's removal.
Posted by DaveH at December 2, 2007 11:48 AM