So Mugabe Had it Right?

The NY Times on the results of the "land grabs" by Mugabe:

Before Zimbabwe’s government began the violent and chaotic seizure of white-owned farms in 2000, fewer than 2,000 farmers were growing tobacco, the country’s most lucrative crop, and most were white. Today, 60,000 farmers grow tobacco here, the vast majority of them black and many of them working small plots that were allotted to them in the land upheavals. Most had no tobacco farming experience yet managed to produce a hefty crop, rebounding from a low of 105 million pounds in 2008 to more than 330 million pounds this year.

The success of these small-scale farmers has led some experts to reassess the legacy of Zimbabwe’s forced land redistribution, even as they condemn its violence and destruction.

But amid that pain, tens of thousands of people got small farm plots under land reform, and in recent years many of these new farmers overcame early struggles to fare pretty well. With little choice but to work the land, the small-scale farmers have made a go of it, producing yields that do not match those of the white farmers whose land they were given, but are far from the disaster many anticipated, some analysts and scholars say.

So essentially, had the British lived up to their obligations to "compensate" white farmers so that the land resettlement could have gone peacefully there would have been a better outcome. However; because the British did not live up to their obligations and instead sought to demonize Mugabe, Mugabe lived up to his promises to *his* people and now after the forecasts of doom and gloom and all manner of "western" interference, the people are actually benefiting from the decision of one Robert Mugabe.

And mind you this is just Tobacco.