Dear friends, the situation worsens day by day. Queues at banks depress everyone and much of the time there is no money there. The money buys very little. World Food Programme now says 50% of Zimbabweans need constant daily food relief. An FAO sponsored Government/NGO survey in August said that 70% of rural people have no access to maize which is our staple. No one thought to ask about sweet potato.

However, Agri-Biotech has this week set in motion

(i) Ploughing at Crop science, University of Zimbabwe, watering the hard clods yesterday and we will plant our elite VE sweet potato tomorrow into good tilth of about one hectare – for multiplying so that in two months we will harvest vines to distribute to NGOs/farmers. The tubers go to the workers who otherwise cannot afford to travel in to work, and to the Department who cannot bring our secretary in either to record the exam results;

(ii) Agreement to cut and carry cassava from Chiredzi, where we have three hectares of ten-foot-tall planting material, to a Brigadier's farm near Karoi (five tractors, irrigation, labour "not yet too corrupt as he has only returned from UN duty two years ago" says William Chagumaira, his nephew and our AgBio man;

(iii) An offer to a white farmer from Chegutu)/Hartley to get him going while he also grows for us;

(iv) Consolidating good relationships on Lonely Park, home of the Retzlaufs, where our mother plants fill a big greenhouse and survive there through the winters – where our manager and administrator (now ex-manager etc) soured relations and tried to walk off with all our material last month – we are still sorting that out as they took our computers and fax and all our records too! Also our on-going AgBio contracts with NGOs! Adversity sharpens temptation – I left them to run the show in 2007/8 while I focussed on the lab developments – big mistake;

(v) Negotiations with our Chiredzi farmer, low-veldt grower, that he continues despite the above shenanigans – we need to pay him as the above breakaways did so poorly over ten months of good growth; he is currently loyally staying up at night with a shotgun in his field as the wild pigs have found they like our cassava tubers;

(vi) Starting three Chinoyi University students, Brian, Shorai and Russell, in the lab – they are on attachment for a whole year – cost to us = 1-200 US a month for commuter fares to lab. One will tackle making Bt open-pollinated maize for rural farmers (stem-borer-resistant) another Bt cotton (boll-worm resistant) using local germplasm which will one day provide local competition for Monsanto's hegemony of GM and the third will clone madumbe, the high-protein root crop of Manicaland. These are long-term programmes but we will be taking the first steps;

(vii) Starting four undergraduate projects (it is supposed to be one third of their time but in fact we will not teach this semester so they can do six months full time, again if we pay their bus fares 1-200 US a month); one is going to take on to do bananas as the Kenyans have done very successfully, the next to put the same Bt into the local rugare relish and another to do it for top bred ICRISAT sorghum that is a real alternative to maize in the semi-arid half of the country and the last will aim at local potato the same

(viii) Then there are three just graduated chaps, Siyabusa, Isaac and Jetwell – Jetwell will try to put the two halves of the human insulin gene into two different tobaccos and the chemists can then bring the two together in the test tube while Siyabusa will train with Augustine in Sherugwe and then take on to manage our Gweru fields where a friend who has bought a winery (cheaply) needs to use his 15 extra hectares productively and Isaac will do the same in Bulawayo where an Egyptian Engineering Prof and his Zulu wife have a plot inside the city that needs a pump and we are then set to supply the Matabele with our stuff form there.

I hope this gives you some idea of what we are up to. In my heart I keep hearing 'Be bold, be bold, the country needs you to be bold'. We are just now using up the Robertson's savings from Scotland trusting that once we get that bank account functioning in South Africa that our kind donor will re-supply. Keeping all the above moving plus Elisabeth Ngadze and Farisai Chidzwondo who lead and supervise in the lab has consumed five thousand dollars so far.

Sue Johnstone who has done the books for several Companies to keep tight reign on our spending. You can see from the above that we need a decent manager. One turned up out of the blue last Sunday. He was a project student four years ago. He did a big flower project for Mazowe citrus owned then by Schweppes. Then another in Inyanga and another near Harare, all successful. Then six black empowerment Directors were added to his Board. They first bought themselves six of the latest Mercedes. Then cut Dananai's 1000 US monthly salary in half, and then in half again. He has a wife and three week old daughter. He'd like to work for AgBio doing a part-time research degree and part-time running projects for us (e.g. sweet potato is great baby food and there is none available in Zim right now. He could get that going). I think I need to offer him 600 US a month.

What do you think? aye, Ian

I know I am crazy but God keeps nudging us on and providing both the people and the means. Val and I, having consulted our chaps, are planning to see my only nephew John Everington , married next week in London. {Shona culture, they tell me, says we must go!} Meanwhile Mashiri and William are travelling in our hard-body Isuzu to Mozambique to fill it full of groceries for all our crew with our remaining US dollars. Survival is the key, until sanity returns, aye,