Forests engulf fields that used to produce some of the world’s best tobacco around the northern Zimbabwean town of Banket, while sheds that once stored the leaf stand empty, their corrugated iron roofs ripped off and sold for scrap. Most of the farm workers have left. "We are 15 here now, from roughly 50," said Bruce Mahenya, who lives in a mud-and-grass hut behind a defunct trading store on a farm about 95km northwest of the capital, Harare. "My mother, father and brother have gone. I said I would remain alone in case things get better, but it’s hard." It is a familiar story across vast tracts of Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe’s goal of transforming the countryside through the seizure of about 4,500 white-owned commercial farms remains illusive. Some of the best acreage fell into ruin because senior ruling party officials who took it over had no farming expertise. Other farms also failed because they were given to small producers with no money to pay for fertilizer and equ...
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