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Zimbabwe, Once Well-Fed, Turns to Eating Bugs

As Mugabe blocks aid, starving population's plight nosedives

By Jason Farago, Newser Staff

Posted Dec 22, 2008 6:27 AM CST

(Newser) – Zimbabwe was once "a breadbasket for all of southern Africa," writes Celia Dugger in the New York Times, but a manmade crisis has turned the once-prosperous country into a land of scavengers. The UN says 7 of 10 Zimbabweans eat one meal or fewer a day, thanks to the catastrophic agricultural policies of Robert Mugabe that precipitated economic collapse. "But this year, the hunger is much worse," Dugger reports from outside Harare.

On the tiny farms on Mashonaland, which once provided the entire region with food, villagers have been reduced to eating crickets and beetles. But this year Mugabe blocked international charities from providing food to Zimbabwe, insisting they are part of a Western conspiracy to overthrow him. One villager said she could barely survive through the Zimbabwean summer, but when winter comes, "only God knows what will happen."

[Images (5)]

[Quotes (2)]

Children pick up single corn kernels, once only eaten by animals, spilled on the roadside by trucks from South Africa in Masvingo, south of Harare, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2008. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

A young boy prepares to drink clean water from a borehole in Harare, Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

A Zimbabwean child walks bare foot through a polluted stream in Harare Zimbabwe Friday, Dec. 5, 2008. (AP Photo)

People make their way along a road which has been intercepted by a stream of water in Harare, Zimbabwe Friday, Dec. 5, 2008. (AP Photo)

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, left, and his wife Grace, right, greet delegates at Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party's 10th annual Congress in Bindura, Zimbabwe, Friday, Dec. 19, 2008. (AP Photo)

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Mugabe claimed some Western aid groups were backing his political rival. But his real motive was to clear rural areas of witnesses to his military-led crackdown on opposition supporters and to starve those supporters. - Celia Dugger, in Zimbabwe

A central paradox rests at the heart of Mugabe's long years in power: his failed policies, including the calamitous seizure of commercial farms, made this nation so utterly dependent on aid from the European and American donors he so reviles. -

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Zimbabwe, Once Well-Fed, Turns to Eating Bugs