White farmers stopped from growing food in Zimbabwe

A white South African farmer in Zimbabwe had to slaughter 1,000 of his pigs and feed the meat to crocodiles -- because Mugabe's farm invaders had decided that no pig feed would be allowed on the farm and they're also not allowed to sow fresh crops.

Afrikaner farmer Louis Fick has been farming with pigs, crocodiles, cattle, fish and grain near Chinhoyi since 1993. He said the last of his 3,500 pigs will be finished off within weeks, while all his cattle had already been killed. This is partly due to the Mugabe regime's ban on animal feed and partly because the senior Mugabe crony from the Reserve Bank who had seized the farm in July 2007 also was limiting Fick's farming activities to only 5-hectares of the 400-ha farm. Nothing was happening on the rest of the land - no farming whatsoever, Fick told Afrikaans journalist Waldimar Pelser from Zimbabwe on Wednesday. He is part of a group of farmers who will now once again approach the Southern African Development Community (SADC) http://www.sadc.int/ tribunal in Windhoek, Namibia to try and force President Robert Mugabe's government to reinstate their ownership of expropriated farms.

This picture was taken by a resident who does not want to be identified

Musina border sign Zimbabwe South Africa Life in Zimbabwe is murder these days...

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On 28 November the African tribunal ruled that the expropriation of the farms of 78 farmers was illegal -- however said Fick, thus far no SADC country has been prepared to help enforce the ruling. Zimbabwe has rejected the judgment from the highest court on the African continent. After the ruling he sent his thugs to arrest and beat up five of the farmers who had obtained the judgment against him. Fick and another Afrikaner farmer, Deon Theron, deputy president of the Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe, said on Wednesday they were going to request the tribunal to rule Zimbabwe in contempt of the judgment. "In the long-term Zimbabwe will have to honour the judgment, but in the short-term it is very frustrating," Fick said. "There is no urgency among the (SADC) countries to attend to the matter. "We are in constant contact with the South African government (which chairs the SADC) through the embassy (in Harare), but we're not getting any feedback." In the meantime Mugabe's campaign against the farmers is intensifying. Fick said prominent employees of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank were increasingly targeting farms - why nobody can say, since they don't use them to farm on. On his farm the new 'owner' prohibited the supply of animal feed for the first time in April last year, and then again since last week. Farmers forbidden to plant "They are making it incredibly difficult and are in effect allowing no feed. "We have to throw the feed over high security fences and then load it onto vehicles, but then they lock up the vehicles so that we can't move. "It's not fair towards the animals. Fortunately I can feed the pigs to the crocodiles." In its heyday, the farm as an integrated enterprise supported 3,500 pigs, 12,000 crocodiles, 1,500 cattle and a fish hatchery. Eighty hectares had been planted with wheat and soya in the past. Theron said most of the remaining 300 white farmers were currently being forbidden to plant and the persecution of farmers who refused to stop farming was continuing. "It's a nightmare." see story in English translation here