Jump to full article: Electronic Telegraph (uk), 2002-11-02
Author: Tim Butcher in Chimoio
Intro: Driven off their land in Zimbabwe, scores of white farmers are trekking into neighbouring Mozambique to carve out new lives in a country recovering from years of civil war and appalling floods.
The pioneering excitement felt by the new arrivals is soon tempered by the tough conditions where everything has to be built from scratch.
Forced to spend months in tents on remote plots of land, the farmers are being struck down by more virulent strains of malaria than they are used to back home in Zimbabwe.
Unable to borrow money from banks to pay their start-up costs, the farmers mostly work as "share croppers" for large agricultural companies, signing 10-year contracts with little chance of any financial profit.
But despite the hardships the mood was upbeat at the London Pub in Chimoio, the town that forms the hub for the nascent white Zimbabwean farming community of Mozambique. . .
Down a long track and across a muddy riverbed, things were more austere on the new farm set up by Dawid Lombard, 37, and other farmers as a syndicate working for one of the big tobacco multinationals.
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