President Robert Mugabe is planning to withdraw all financial support for Zimbabwe's black-owned commercial farms, even though the country still faces a chronic national food shortage since the mass land-grab from white landowners seven years ago.

Zimbabwe's Government-run Herald newspaper has quoted Gideon Gono, the head of the country's central bank, as telling a meeting of farmers that the Government would be "weaning off" those who were given large-scale commercial properties when whites were driven from their land.

The move comes despite the fact that the Zimbabwean agriculture industry - a one-time exporter - is now failing to provide the country with enough basic food, leading to chronic nation-wide food shortages and soaring poverty.

Critics of Mr Mugabe's regime blame his land-grab of white-owned farms and their replacement with black farmers, a policy which originated in 2000. It has been claimed that the replacement farmers lacked the equipment or expertise to run the large commercial premises, leading to their decline.

"It is now seven years since we reclaimed our land but we continue looking at the Government for support," Mr Gono was reported as telling the farmers.

"Next season we will wean off all A2 (black) farmers, as they are now grown-ups."

Mr Gono accused large-scale farmers of selling subsidies received from the Government and failing to repay loans given to them. He did, however, confirm that the Government would continue supporting small-scale, subsistence farmers.

Today, Mr Mugabe's authoritarian regime came under further pressure when his Zanu-PF party suspended one of its co-founders for insulting the President in a recently published autobiography.

According to the state's Sunday Mail newspaper, party leaders in 69-year-old Edgar Tekere’s home district of Manicaland, in eastern Zimbabwe, "unreservedly condemned" his book, A Lifetime of Struggle, launched in Harare in January.

The newspaper quoted Tinaye Chigudu, the provincial party chairman, as saying saying the autobiography "clearly and explicitly denigrates and vilifies" Mr Mugabe, and that he was expelled with immediate effect.

Mr Mugabe, 83, was greeted with a noisy protest when he made a three-day state visit to Namibia last week.

Positioned behind cordons outside the Zimbabwean embassy on February 28, demonstrators in the capital city Windhoek held up signs that read "Go Mugabe Go" and "Go Home Dictator."

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