When you exploit natural resources and a labor pool you have to bring the brightest and best of the natives up out of poverty and ignorance.
I don't really believe in multi ethnic and multicltural societies. They're bound to failure for me. My viking ancestor understood it and as soon they came in what would become Normandy, they married local frankish/gaulish girls to avoid any problem. In one generation, most of ethnic problems were solved (okay it was 1300 years ago). Everytime there is a big ethnic minority which is created in a country, that's a source of problem, until this ethnic minority leave or is dissolved into the rest of the ethnic group. If white zimbabwean want to come back, their son and daughters should marry local zimbabwean men or women.
Why can't the government set up an agricultural academy with teachers from agriculturally prominent countries and solve their problem internally? What the hell is wrong with a people that can't produce enough food to feed themselves and have to depend on Europeans to feed them?
Commercial farming requires capitalism, you need to use property as collateral and black Africa are Communists. No property rights, No Commercial farming equals starvation.
Because the government in most African countries is near completely inept. They just wanted to take the farms from the white farmers, without very carefully thinking about it, and assumed that the farms would go on producing just as before. Local communities also got together and tried to make communal decisions, but they were not good at making decisions. It turns out economic operations like a farm are best run by a single person with centralized control, who has personal financial incentives to see the farm be successful. The other half of the problem was that the new groups that took over the farms lacked wealth to invest in it, or buy essential supplies. Lack of experience in running a farm, which is a complicated business, could be part of the cause, but it was so much more than that. Some of these Black workers on the farms were very much experts at what they did, but they were only experts in that one area in which they worked. That is why even with their agricultural expertise, collectively it still failed. The role of the white farmer-owner in organizing them all together, and making certain farm decisions, was underestimated. What some people might call "sober" and "prudent" type of decisions that are required for the success of a farm. (It takes a certain type of temperament to successfully run a farm, it's not really a thing absolutely anyone could do successfully) The particular land where many of these farms are located is in more arid areas, where irrigation is very important. The area was not being used for agriculture before settlement under colonialism.
