Rural Zimbabweans Are Desperately Panning for Gold Powder to Ward Off Starvation
February 15th, 2009Why don’t people grow potatoes? Why don’t they grow beans? Wouldn’t that be easier than panning for gold all day to buy industrial food?
In this video, I saw dirt, ruminant animals, water, and plenty of biomass that could be turned into compost. People had shovels… Yet, starvation is setting in.
I don’t understand why you wouldn’t create a garden to feed yourself. How could I? I’m neither broke nor starving. It might be that if you grew some spuds, someone with a gun would come along and say, “Thanks, I’ll take those spuds.”
I have no idea.
Welcome to fiat currency Hell.
Via: Guardian:
MDC activist Sam Chakaipa returns to his village in rural Zimbabwe to find his friends and neighbours starving to death, reduced to panning gold powder from the rivers to exchange for food at an exorbitant rate.
I don’t know about these particular Zimbabweans, but in general capitalism makes pure subsistence agriculture impossible. In developed nations enclosures have eliminated most common land, the result being that farmers must pay either rent or property taxes.
Sure, you could grow enough to feed yourself, but if you don’t pay the protection money to the state, you’re run off the land and caged like a feral animal.
(And to the libertarian extremists: the elimination of the state also precludes the enforcement of private property; you can’t have it both ways.)
They don’t know how? No irrigation? No seeds? Bad soil?
But yeah, considering everyone is apparently starving, even if you were able to grow food, it’s unlikely it would survive to maturity.
The soil was very definitely very poor quality. Reviewing the video, I noticed how there are very few tall, robust trees. There is also very little woody organic material and the soil is very light colored.
Normal farming techniques focus on annual plants that require significant working of the soil. That type of farming destroys the fungi growing in it, as well as, making it prone to erosion. A move to using primarily perennial food producing plants, amending the soil with char, and protecting the soil with compost isn’t what they know.
There have been numerous accounts of people stealing from farmers/gardeners in Zimbabwe, often at the point of a gun. Sometimes the thieves are state police or soldiers. Still, it makes me wonder why the people in the rural areas at least can’t band together to grow a garden and protect it.
My mother and family totally depended on a garden plot at the edge of town in Germany after the bombing. It’s hard to understand how there was lots of theft, but their fence was adequate to stop most of it? They still starved.
In Zimbabwe, much of it has to be lack of land ownership plus ability to defend marginal or squatted fields. They lost the land first through colonialism, and now again through chaotic transition. Money is a way of exchanging specialized labor, and allocating hours to gold panning instead of food production is very inefficient if they were capable of gardening at all. E.g. who holds the grain they’d like to buy? Farming is what caused property law to develop because you need to be able to defend initial investment of work.
If your entire neighborhood is not gardening, and some/all are starving, there is little point in personal gardening unless you (1) can provide 24hr security over your plot and (2) are prepared to use [possibly deadly] force to defend your subsistence produce.
Also, a starving person will have a very hard time putting effort into a crop with a harvest date months out, which may or may not yield, which may or may not be stolen at any time while sleeping.