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Stardate
20020430.2117 (On Screen): Robert Mugabe has no redeeming features. He's corrupt, cruel, incompetent, and concerned only with his own survival and retention of power. He has taken a nation which had a successful economy and run it into the ground. He has taken a nation which used to export food and turned it into one big famine.
Last year the nation produced 1.4 million tons of corn, a relatively low figure historically speaking. This year, the yield will be 750,000 tons. The nation needs 2 million tons simply to stave off mass starvation.
And because of Mugabe's policies, Zimbabwe's mining industry, its tobacco industry and its tourism industry have all collapsed, thus shutting down most sources of hard currency to the nation. Mugabe's recent blatant manipulation of an "election" has ostracized him in the world.
And his people need a million and a quarter tons of corn, or else there will be mass starvation and a refugee problem to make any previous one in Africa look tiny by comparison.
So what are we to do? We've got the money, and we've got the grain.
One voice inside me says, "Fuck 'em. They brought this on themselves."
Another voice screams at that other one in outrage: "You would punish 8 million people for the sins of one man?"
If we given them the food, we keep Mugabe in power. But if we don't, we're worse monsters than he is. If we give them the food, what's to deter the next thug from doing the same thing? But Mugabe himself isn't going to starve no matter what. How does this even represent a deterrent? But if we subsidize him and keep him in power, then we also are complicit in the evil he does in future.
This is one of those situations where every course of action stinks. Giving Zimbabwe the food it needs will save millions of lives, but it will also reward Mugabe and sustain him in power.
And it's not necessarily obvious whether giving them the food actually saves those lives, or whether it simply defers their deaths for a while.
The answer I keep coming up with is this: They need 1.25 million tons of corn. That's what they get. They don't get money to buy corn, they get corn delivered to their border. Exactly as much as they say the need, but no more. They are responsible for distributing it, and if they don't and there's mass starvation anyway, on their own heads be it. They get nothing, nothing, else. No money, no machinery, no technical assistance, no money, nothing. Nada.
And every diplomat they have here will be told to go home, and we cut them off in every other way we can, as long as Mugabe is alive and in power and refuses to hold an honest election.
What they get is the bare minimum aid needed to keep everyone alive, until such time as they straighten out their own mess. But they get nothing else whatever. And if through their incompetence or brutality or corruption there's mass death anyway, then it's their fault, not ours.
I don't like this answer, but all the others are worse.
Update: North Korea is the model, and it shows why the answer I just gave is terrible. North Korea has been unable to feed its people for years now, and due to the complete collapse of its economy (due to mismanagement by the government) it is unable to pay for the food it needs. So it's been surviving on charity shipments of food, though rumor has it that much of that food has been diverted once inside the country, thus leading to rumors of mass starvation anyway. Right at the moment, the UN World Food Program hasn't been given enough money to maintain shipments of food to North Korea at the rate required, and will soon have to shut down.
But the food which has been sent in the past has effectively sustained the Kim government in power, leading to the deaths of perhaps a million people and untold misery for millions more.
"I think it's fair to say there are a number of countries that remain forgotten emergencies," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund. "This is one."
No, it isn't, because by definition any chronic situation isn't an emergency. (It may be a terrible situation, but it isn't an emergency.) In this case, the fact that foreign sources (primarily the US) have been willing to pony up the money to keep charity food shipments coming have had the side effect of removing any impetus for the government of North Korea to change its disastrous commitment to Stalinist collective farming.
If we start sending food to Zimbabwe, will it not do the same, and stabilize the Mugabe kleptocracy?
So perhaps the answer is to give Zimbabwe food, but less than it needs. Let there be pain in Zimbabwe, pain which can only be alleviated by internal change. Except that hasn't worked in North Korea, where as many as 2 million may already have starved, while the Kim government remains solidly in power.
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