Former Zim farmers bring jobs to Mozambique

Mail and Guardian (SA) | 13 January 2004

[Clive]

White Zimbabwean commercial farmers have created more than 4,000 jobs in neighbouring Mozambique, where they settled after being ousted from their land back home, a regional governor said on Tuesday.

"The Zimbabwean farmers with about 1,000ha of land each have so far generated a total of 4,118 new jobs," said Soares Nhaca, governor of the central Mozambican province of Manica, where the farmers settled.

Nhaca said there are about 100 Zimbabwean farmers in the fertile districts of Manica province, growing traditional cash crops such as tobacco, cotton and maize.

Most of the new jobs are on tobacco farms, the governor said, adding that some farmers also grow mangoes and millet for export to South Africa.

The majority of the Zimbabwean commercial farmers have been alloted land in the two districts of Barue and Sussundenga, near the border with Zimbabwe.

Mozambique has taken a cautious approach to requests from white farmers for land, hoping to avoid replicating Zimbabwe's inequitable pattern of land ownership, in which the tiny white minority owned more than one-quarter of the nation's land.

In 2000, the Zimbabwean government accelerated a land reform programme under which land was seized from white farmers and redistributed to landless blacks.

Since then, more than three-quarters of Zimbabwe's 4,500 white commercial farmers have been expropriated of about 11-million hectares.

All land in Mozambique belongs to the state and cannot be sold.

The Constitution only allows land to be leased.

Manica province, which borders Zimbabwe, is the most sought-after by foreign farmers.

Nhaca said his government has also received land requests from South African farmers.

The whole of central and northern Mozambique possesses land with almost the same characteristics as those in Manica -- good soil and climate. -- Sapa-AFP

[Clive]

The leases are 50 year terms of years.

The story doesn't mention that the "expropriations" were without compensation and carried out vi et armis by thrugs calling themselves "war veterans" and that the "landless blacks" were Zanu PF party cadre, with the best land taken by cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, senior military officers and relatives of Mugabe and his cronies.

We now have nations including Mozambique, Zambia, Nigeria and Chad offering enticements to Zimbabwe farmers to immigrate and take up commercial farm leases.

[Clive]

-

[blam]

"We now have nations including Mozambique, Zambia, Nigeria and Chad offering enticements to Zimbabwe farmers to immigrate and take up commercial farm leases."

Regardless, their days in Africa are numbered.

[laconic]

The lease approach is undoubtedly the best for all concerned. That way, no incoming radicals in a new government can steal the land from the farmers who worked it. Amazing that they had to leave Zimbabwe and much to the surprise of the simpletons in the Mugabe government, no one is now growing any food!

[Coeur de Lion]

Mugabe could've achieved the "land reform" that he argued was necessary to cure a "colonial injustice", if he voluntarily offered the "white tribe" the opportunity to train and apprentice some of the black farm workers working the land in modern principles of farming and land management. An incentive could've been created to reward those who successfully showed promise and merited it by their work with parcels of land to run on their own. Was such a plan ever offered? No! Mugabe has consistently presenting the land grab as righting the wrong done to "black" Africans by the colonials even though the benefit went without exception to the Shona tribe--none of the other tribes from whom almost all the farm workers came from. Mugabe isn't a "black nationalist." He's nothing more than a tribal potentate and dictator, and the sooner he's gone the better for all Zimbabweans.

[Clive]

As of the year 2000 when this insanity started, about 15 percent of the members of the Commercial Farmers Union were black.

Farm workers were being taught. Commercial farming, especially on the red soil southern African veldt, is a technological endeavour and requires a skilled work force (ask any prairie or outback farmer).

Those skilled agriculture workers were driven off the land along with the farm owners and are now living hard in the bush or are part of a large and growing diapora.

There is a volkerwandering going on comprised largely of displaced black farm workers, A volkerwanderund disrupts the economies of the regions into which it moves.

Meanwhile, the best land is being handed over to senior party cadre and cronies and the leavings to lesser party members, few of whom have any expertise in veldt farming.

[Clive]

OOPs, typo: "diapora" should read "diaspora.

[Cuttnhorse]

OOPs, typo: "diapora" should read "diaspora.

We knew whatcha meant.

[backhoe]

-South Africa - The sellout of a nation-- -Cry, the Beloved Country-- -Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power-- -A Capsule History of Southern Africa-- -Rhetoric of blame is now a white lie-- -First it was Rhodesia then SA now America paying the price of silence-- -Parallels between Apartheid SA and USA-- -Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight--

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-South Africa - The sellout of a nation-- -Cry, the Beloved Country-- -Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power-- -A Capsule History of Southern Africa-- -Rhetoric of blame is now a white lie-- -First it was Rhodesia then SA now America paying the price of silence-- -Parallels between Apartheid SA and USA-- -Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight--