Basildon Peta: My mother's choice: eat cattle feed, or go hungry

My 68-year-old mother has to cope with tough choices in Robert Mugabe's present day Zimbabwe.

Either she has to feed on yellow maize, which is grown in China for cattle feed purposes, or she must starve.

Otherwise, she can wait for me to find a way of getting white maize to her from Johannesburg, about 750 miles away – no easy matter, as Zimbabwe customs officials are not allowing food imports without the hard-to-get government import licences.

The work and effort needed to buy the yellow maize donated by President Mugabe's communist allies in China is no laughing matter. She has to queue alongside thousands other Zimbabweans to buy her share. The queues don't mean the yellow maize is available. People just queue in anticipation of its arrival. Many days it doesn't arrive, but the queues remain.

The political and economic crisis in this beleaguered country of 13 million inhabitants is deepening despite Mr Mugabe's "victory" in the March election.

Perhaps it is only now that many Zimbabweans have begun to feel the real impact of Mr Mugabe's drive to confiscate white land and distribute it among his supporters. Many of those have dismally failed to sustain production levels.

Most were dumped on the farms in the run-up to Zimbabwe's parliamentary election in June 2000 without the necessary back-up equipment and resources. Many more were dumped in the period leading to Zimbabwe's March 2002 presidential election.

It took me a drive along the main highway from Harare to the once plush tourist resort of Kariba to appreciate the extent of the ruin of Mr Mugabe's land seizure policies on Zimbabwe's commercial agriculture.

Commercial farms along the highway would normally make any visitor to Zimbabwe green with envy. Even the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher publicly acknowledged Zimbabwe's agricultural prowess when she flew over the area during a state visit in 1986 and saw huge swathes of tobacco, wheat, and maize.

But a drive through the same highway today exposes one to large patches of emerging forests. The productive farms have been cut into small pieces of land where no production is taking place. Small grass-thatched huts stand distinctively on the small plots carved out of the large commercial farms.

It is not surprising that many of the ruling party supporters, who accepted the small pieces of land in the euphoria of Mr Mugabe's election campaign, are abandoning the plots to go back to their original communal areas. The equipment, the boreholes, the schools and the clinics they were promised are nowhere in sight.

While everyone agrees in principle with the need for land reform and redistribution, Mr Mugabe's approach is not a credible reform process geared towards poverty alleviation. In fact, it is the easiest and fastest way of destroying a once viable agricultural sector.

Repression and more repression has become a daily diet for Zimbabweans. As one political commentator said: "All he cares for is power, power and more power ... It's now power to Mugabe, poverty to the people."

Yet the most surprising development is the deafening silence from the international community to Zimbabwe's human rights abuses.

Regional analysts now warn that time might be running out rapidly to prevent serious bloodshed in Zimbabwe and throw the whole southern Africa region into turmoil. The need for the international community, particularly the EU, to revisit its "all bark, no bite" policies on Mr Mugabe cannot be over emphasised.