The governments of the rich world don't like land reform. It requires state intervention, which offends the god of free markets, and it hurts big farmers and the companies which supply them. Indeed, it was Britain's refusal either to permit or to fund an adequate reform programme in Zimbabwe which created the political opportunities Mugabe has so ruthlessly exploited. The Lancaster House agreement gave the state to the black people but the nation to the whites. Mugabe manipulates the genuine frustrations of a dispossessed people.

The president of Zimbabwe is a very minor devil in the hellish politics of land and food. The sainted Nelson Mandela has arguably done just as much harm to the people of Africa, by surrendering his powers to the IMF as soon as he had wrested them from apartheid. Let us condemn Mugabe's racist attacks upon Zimbabwe's whites by all means, but only if we are also prepared to condemn the far bloodier war which the rich world wages against the poor.

George Monbiot

http://www.monbiot.com