The World Health Organisation (WHO) launched this year's campaign for World No Tobacco Day with the slogan: 'Tobacco and Poverty: a vicious circle', stressing the enormous economic costs of tobacco use and cultivation to families, communities and countries. The slogan 'a vicious circle' explains the inextricable link that exists between tobacco and poverty, and how the use of tobacco, especially by poorer people who consume this product the most, can cause harmful consequences to their already precarious economies and income.

Since the Zimbabwe Government embarked on its fast track land resettlement programme, the food situation, particularly in respect of the staple maize, has been getting worse every year. Initially people were talking of food shortage, but "famine" would now seem a more appropriate term to apply to the situation the country now faces. "Famine" has been used to describe situations of extreme food scarcity and starvation in countries such as Ethiopia and Eritrea. Nobody ever contemplated that Zimbabwe, formerly the bread-basket of southern Africa, would come to be referred to in terms of famine.