"What's for dinner honey?" "Rats again?'Zimbabwe sure is doing well after displacingand killing off the whitefarmers. Now, who would have guessed the country would go to hell so quickly with blacks in charge?
[url]http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/12/19/koinange.zimbabwe /index.html[/url]
Living off rats to survive in Zimbabwe
(CNN) -- Twelve-year-old Beatrice returns from the fields with small animals she's caught for dinner.
Her mother, Elizabeth, prepares the meat and cooks it on a grill made of three stones supporting a wood fire. It's just enough food, she says, to feed her starving family of six.
Tonight, they dine on rats.
"Look what we've been reduced to eating?" she said. "How can my children eat rats in a country that
used to export food? This is a tragedy."
This is a story about how Zimbabwe, once dubbed
southern Africa's bread basket, has in six short years become a basket case. It is about a country that once exported surplus food now apparently
falling apart, with many residents scrounging for rodents to survive.
...
But Shadrack Gutto, of the Center for International Political Studies, said Zimbabwe is on the verge of collapse.
"The reality is it's really grinding down and not improving," he said.
The downslide began, critics say, in 2000 when the
government crippled the country's prime commercial farms by running off white farmers and redistributing the land to Mugabe's cronies. At least a dozen white farmers were killed and dozens were injured and hospitalized. Thousands more fled the country and the land. Most of that land now lies empty and abandoned.