By the time she harvests one season’s crop, she’s already running out of the previous one. She knows she should be rotating her crops, leaving part of the land fallow so the nutrients in the soil regenerate.

These days, Chachengwa’s plot yields just more than 100 pounds of maize per year, about one-eightieth of what she used to produce. From nearby villages, she heard rumors of miscarriages, cattle dying after drinking it. She started getting cracks on her feet and rashes on her arms. Even worse, the irrigation water was runoff from the sugar mill, acidic, with a greenish tint. Yes, it was smaller, her district chief told her, but it would be irrigated, more productive, and easier to tend.Īfter she planted her maize, though, Chachengwa discovered that the irrigation only came intermittently, the canals drying up for days at a time. She would be allocated a new plot, about one-sixtieth the size of her old one, and farther from her home. The processing plant, eight miles away, was already under construction.Ĭhachengwa, like everyone else, would never get her original land back. The land was going to be converted into sugarcane fields. Chachengwa learned that everyone’s plots, all the surrounding villages, had been sold to an ethanol company. Some years, they produced as much as four tons of maize and 120 bales of cotton.īut on that morning, Chachengwa came out to her plot to find her entire season - months of work - plowed over, the earth scraped into lines, ready for someone else’s crops to be planted.įrom there, things only got worse. Since she lost her husband, she had relied on her two daughters and eight grandchildren to help tend her 75-acre plot. Every year, she took out loans for seeds and fertilizer, and then paid them back with her harvest. Chachengwa had been growing maize and cotton here her whole life.

CHISUMBANJE, Zimbabwe - Joyce Chachengwa woke up one morning to find her crops - her only source of food and income - ground into the dirt.Ĭhisumbanje is a small village in eastern Zimbabwe, right on the border with Mozambique.

Third world farmer hacked