Corruption & despair choke Zimbabwe: it was once one of Africa's most prosperous countries. But five years after its government began seizing white-owned farms, Zimbabwe's economy is in ruins.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: International

Edson used to be a foreman on a farm 40 miles south of Harare, Zimbabwe s capital. "They came to us and said, 'You have 10 minutes to leave this farm.' Ten minutes, that's it," says the 29-year-old black man, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used. "We lost all our money, all our property--everything." Since then, he says, the 600-acre tract has lain fallow.

It's a scene that has been repeated thousands of times across Zimbabwe. Since 1998, the government of President Robert G. Mugabe and his followers have confiscated 25,000 square miles of white-owned farmland in the name of compensating black Zimbabweans for a century of British and white rule, but also in an effort to revive Mugabe's fading popularity. All but about 600 of 4,500 white farmers have been kicked off their land. As a result, nearly 300,000 black farmworkers have been uprooted. Most are now jobless, and many of the farms lie fallow.

Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia, was one of Africa's most prosperous nations. But the land seizures have sent agriculture, the country's mainstay, into precipitous decline and the economy into a tailspin. Now Zimbabwe is in desperate shape, suffering from famine and choked by ever-tighter government restrictions on not only the economy, but on basic freedoms as well.

Mugabe, 79, a leader of Zimbabwe's independence movement, has been the country's only ruler since independence in 1980, first as Prime Minister and then as President since 1987. He was re-elected in March 2002, in elections considered a sham by his political opponents, foreign observers and the U.S. Since then, all opposition media have been shut down and foreign journalists expelled.

"This country is truly in a crisis," says Collen Gwiyo of the Zimbabwe Coalition of Trade Unions, which opposes Mugabe's government. "It's a political crisis, leading to an economic crisis, feeding a humanitarian disaster."

FOOD SHORTAGES

In a nation that exported beef and wheat only three years ago, 4 million people--one third of the population--now rely on foreign food donations. Forty percent of Zimbabwe's children are now suffering from malnutrition, according to the United Nations. Foreign investment has vanished, and only 1 in 10 workers now holds a steady job.

"I haven't had a job in two years--nobody here has a job," says a 27 year-old man in a suburb of Harare.

Desperate citizens here have become dark-of-night scavengers of coffins, copper electrical cable and even...