Zimbabwe -- The lie of the land

ZWNews ^ | November 1, 2002 | Michael Hartnack

[Clive]

Daily, Zimbabwe's state-run media proclaims the “success of the now-completed land reforms,” which, they say, has roused the envy of the British government, the independent media and all the other opponents of Robert Mugabe.

As ever, the issue of land redistribution is mired in propaganda and misinformation.

In any case, the threat of famine has vastly more immediate importance to 12 million Zimbabweans struggling to find supplies of maize meal, bread, sugar, cooking oil, salt.

As the first rains of the season fell a week ago, the state-owned Herald carried full-page advertisements telling old-established communal area and newly resettled farmers where to obtain free seed and fertiliser. For an optimum harvest come March 2003, these should have been distributed two months ago. The Famine Early Warning Network say most land recipients have no seed, nor any idea when they will be able to obtain it.

Ruling Zanu PF party officials admit up to half of those allocated land have not occupied the farms seized from white owners, or made any move to work the soil. Critics of Mugabe put the figure much higher, with up to 90 percent of the 8 million commandeered hectares lying fallow.

Only 600 of the 5,000 white farmers are still attempting to plant crops, many on extremely limited areas alongside fields that have been pegged by militants, but left to go derelict. "The rest have been driven out," says Jerry Grant of the Commercial Farmers Union. With them have gone 250 000 farm workers and up to 2 million dependants, and of these only 10 percent have found a place to squat on abandoned white farms.

Despite efforts to encourage production by the new farmers, output of tobacco, which traditionally earned a third of Zimbabwe's foreign currency, is expected to fall from more than 200 million kg to between 70 and 80 million kg.

Commercial farmers' maize crop will decline from 810,000 tonnes in 2000 to virtually nil in 2003.

While production in resettlement areas is not taking off, that in the established 20 million hectare communal areas is declining due to AIDS deaths, resulting labour shortages, and falling family incomes, say development agencies.

Peasant maize production has always depended heavily on the ability of the now near-bankrupt state agencies to provide subsidies in various forms.

Those with the best chance of reaping meaningful crops in 2003 are the members of the wealthy black elite who have seized farms. They include Jocelyn Chiwenga, wife of army commander Constantine Chiwenga, who has already been selling, to the British chain store Sainsburys, produce grown by the farmer she ousted.

This tiny, wealthy minority have the capital and the capacity to hire agricultural graduates - in some cases ex- commercial farmers - as managers. The commercial banks are giving them finance on the strength of urban assets, such as up-market houses, although realists warn that attachment of these assets is likely to be resisted at gunpoint should the owners prove a bad risk. The morality or otherwise of the banks' collaboration with the so-called “fat cat land grabbers” may come to haunt Zimbabwe's financial sector in years ahead. Their bankability must run out with the regime.

And the new large-scale landowners - hardly the landless peasants who were supposed to be the principal beneficiaries of land redistribution - will have difficulty cashing in on export crops, since foreign buyers are wary of being sued in their home countries for receiving stolen produce. Sainsburys has said it thought the farmer had been compensated, and will now review the deal.

However, the black elite should be well placed to plant food crops for local consumption with planned subsidies totalling Z$50 billion. An "Agri-bond" for this amount is being forced on the pension funds despite economists' warnings this may leave thousands of pensioners holding worthless annuities in their declining years.

Inflation is already 139.9 percent and the IMF forecast it may go to 522 percent next year.

One thing is for sure, everything that goes wrong with production under the Fast Track Land Reform will be blamed on others, ranging from sabotage by departing whites to Western governments' responsibility for climate change.

[Clive]

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