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Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has said that people who murdered white farmers during a government-sanctioned purge in the 2000s will never be prosecuted. The 93-year-old president addressed a rally in Harare on Monday to mark Heroes’ Day, which commemorates soldiers who have fought for the country, particularly in its independence war against British colonizers. Zimbabwe implemented a controversial land reform program in 2000 that saw squatters invade and seize hundreds of white-owned farms around the country. The violent seizures resulted in the murder of several white farmers, with many more displaced, and close associates of Mugabe given large chunks of...

SOUTH Africa’s parliament has voted in favour of a motion that will begin the process of amending the country’s Constitution to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation. The motion was brought by Julius Malema, leader of the radical Marxist opposition party the Economic Freedom Fighters, and passed overwhelmingly by 241 votes to 83 against. The only parties who did not support the motion were the Democratic Alliance, Freedom Front Plus, Cope and the African Christian Democratic Party. It was amended but supported by the ruling African National Congress and new president Cyril Ramaphosa, who made land expropriation...

Until 2000 Zimbabwe had a successful wildlife-management program, with many big-game animals flourishing. But by 2003, a staggering 80% of the animals that had lived on Zimbabwean safari camps (which employed firm quotas to regulate animal population sizes) had died. By 2007, there were only 14 private game farms in the country, compared with 620 prior to the land seizures of 2000, according to a National Geographic report. With the protection of private game reserves nearly nonexistent, once abundant wildlife began dying off, hunted by desperate farmers with no other options for sustenance. Despite the passing of harsher laws for...

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's government has reportedly indicated, for the first time, that it may hand back land to some white farmers whose farms were forcibly taken away from them during the height of the country’s controversial land reform programme. This comes a decade and a half after the Zimbabwean government seized large swaths of land from white farmers in the country - a move that saw a drastic deterioration in the country's economy. According to The Telegraph, Minister of Lands Douglas Mombeshora said provincial leaders had been tasked to come up with names of white farmers they wanted to...

Federal Brazilian police and military personnel, some wearing UN insignia, are forcibly relocating communities in Brazil at gunpoint under the guise of returning land to Indians. Amid Federal Land Grab in Brazil, Whole Towns Evicted at Gunpoint The New American 07 January 2013 Federal Brazilian police and military personnel, some wearing United Nations insignia, are forcibly relocating whole communities in Brazil at gunpoint under the guise of returning huge tracts of land to a small group of Indians whose ancestors were allegedly there at some point. Thousands of local residents who have lived in the area for decades or...

For us it is a saddening sight - a magnificent bull elephant struck down in his old age. But for the starving of Zimbabwe, it was little short of a miracle. The carcass provided a vital source of food, and hundreds of desperate villagers in the Gonarezhou National Park descended on the dead animal within minutes of its discovery. Using machetes, axes and knives made from tin cans they set upon the six-ton carcass, which was found deep in scrubland.

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chavez's socialist government is creating peasant-based militias throughout Venezuela's rural, agricultural-rich regions, raising fears of confrontation among the country's cattle ranchers and landholders. The armed groups, organized by Venezuela's military, will be responsible for protecting poor farmers from vigilante groups allegedly organized and financed by cattlemen and wealthy landowners, Chavez wrote in a newspaper column Sunday... The government claims that more than 300 peasants have been killed - purportedly by mercenaries for wealthy landholders - since authorities launched a sweeping land reform initiative in 2001. Landowners and cattle ranchers dispute those claims, saying Chavez's administration is...

"The road ends here," reads a makeshift sign in the middle of the highway connecting Bulawayo with South Africa. For many miles, the once busy commercial artery between Zimbabwe's second largest town and its main market has simply ceased to exist. Motorists have to wind their way on an improvised gravel path through the open bush. All along the route, they can observe once productive farms lying abandoned and once productive farm workers scavenging for food. The dilapidated state of infrastructure and widespread poverty are the results of the destruction of property rights and the rule of law by the...

ACCRA, Ghana, Sep 23, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Monday urged Africans to team up to fight poverty, saying boundary-less cooperation means boundless economic potential. "Through cooperation and collaborative efforts, termites have been able to pull down strong edifices," Clinton said. "Bees have been able to build houses for humans to tap heir honey from." Clinton, who is in Africa to promote efforts to fight AIDS and encourage economic development, was speaking to an assemblage of government ministers, traditional rulers and academics at the launch of Ghana President John Kufuor's Foundation for...

Land reform in South Africa is a key ANC policy but it is going badly wrong. Rosie Goldsmith, Reporter for Radio 4 Crossing Continents, met black claimants and white farmers who are caught in the struggle over land. Bernhard Mojapelo is university educated, with a good job in the city. But his main passion in life is for a vast stretch of barren rural scrubland. Thanks to South Africa's land reform, he and his tribe have been able to lodge a claim for it. "Land is a source of life," Bernhard says. "When we were dispossessed and driven away from...

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa's cabinet has approved a bill that would speed up its land reform programme aimed at transferring 30 percent of farmland to black ownership by 2014, a government spokesman said on Thursday. An existing land expropriation act has failed to make significant inroads into land redistribution. The government says a willing-buyer willing-seller arrangement with farmers has failed. White farmers are hesitant to sell their prime land at reduced market prices. "It's approved as of yesterday," government spokesman Themba Maseko told Reuters. The bill now needs parliamentary approval. The government set itself a target of handing...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has threatened to nationalise farms, in an effort to tackle food shortages. Government controls keep food prices low in shops to help even the poorest Venezuelans feed themselves.

ANENECUILCO, Mexico -- I wish my American friends who fret about Mexican immigrants could be here with me. Listening to Emiliano Zapata, a laborer who happens to be the grandson and namesake of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, they perhaps would get a clearer sense of how the migration of Mexicans originated a few decades ago and why it continues today. The state of Morelos is where Zapata's revolution -- one of the various armed struggles that made up the multifaceted Mexican Revolution -- started almost a century ago, before it spread all across the south of Mexico. Zapata was a...

JOHANNESBURG – Government will not rest until most of the land is in the hands of black owners. This is according to Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Lulu Xingwana, who was reacting to recent parliamentary questions. “Land reform remains a constitutional mandate,” she said. “Once all the restitution claims have been settled and the redistribution target of 30% has been met, there will still be a need to improve on the ratio of 70% of agricultural land owned by whites and 30% by blacks, until land ownership in the country reflects its demographics in terms of race and gender.”...

SAN FELIPE, Venezuela -- Vicente Lecuna jabs a wall map of his Santa Isabel ranch so angrily that the map crashes to the floor. "I used to produce 10,000 tons of sugar cane a year," says the 67-year-old Venezuelan cattleman. "Now it's zero! Zero!" he shouts. Two years ago, squatters seized about half of Mr. Lecuna's 3,000-acre ranch, setting up a cooperative named "Re-Founding the Fatherland." Far from being evicted, the squatters got loans and tractors from the government of President Hugo Chávez. They then uprooted the sugar cane and decided to try their hand at growing plantains. "We are...

HARARE - Desperate for foreign currency, the corrupt Mugabe regime is now dishing out prime agricultural land to the Chinese, having grabbed it from commercial farmers under the pretext of giving land to the people. The Chinese have also been given mining concessions and future tobacco crops in exchange for foreign currency and farm machinery. But because of rampant corruption and the artificially maintained chasm between the official and parallel rates of exchange, most of the forex will end up in the pockets of Zanu (PF) fatcats, while agriculture, mining and industry collapse. Analysts say Mugabe has mortgaged the nation's...

Venezuelan Government Seizes Land for Farming Cooperatives By VOA News26 March 2007 The Venezuelan government has seized about 330,000 hectares of land it considers idle from 16 estates for use as collective farms. Hugo Chavez President Hugo Chavez announced the seizures Sunday on his weekly Hello, President television show.He said the land will be mostly used to raise cattle for meat and milk production.He did not elaborate on how the collectivization of the property would work, but said the land belongs to everyone and will benefit everyone.Mr. Chavez said the move is part of a program to do away...

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, March 3 (UPI) -- The South African government has warned white farmers their land could be seized if they try to stall efforts to buy it for redistribution. All redistribution so far has been under a "willing buyer, willing seller" policy. But Tumi Seboka, regional lands commissioner for North West provinces, said this week that seizure is a possibility, The Telegraph reported. "In all cases where negotiations are going to be stalled by intransigence and deliberate frustration of the restitution process by the current landowners, we are going to expropriate," she said. In 1994, when the African...

THE Ministry of Lands and Resettlement has advertised two farms for resettlement without the foreign-born owner's knowledge. The first resettlement applicant has already arrived for a "farm inspection", The Namibian learnt yesterday. The advertisement appeared in a Government publication last Friday, offering the two farms Wyoming and Kansas, situated about 250 kilometres south-east of Windhoek, for resettlement purposes. The owner, retired eye specialist Dr Rolf Schindler, is a German national who arrived in Namibia in 1985 and has permanent residence here. For a number of years, Schindler was the only eye specialist in the country. He is the third farm...

South Africa has seized its first farm - in the clearest indication yet that it is bowing to growing pressure to redistribute land to majority blacks. Black pressure groups and trade unions have been threatening to begin invading farms unless the government moved quickly to redistribute land. Among many of South Africa's 50,000-plus white commercial farmers, this first land expropriation by President Thabo Mbeki's government echoes Robert Mugabe's violent land seizures in neighbouring Zimbabwe where at least 4,000 farmers have been evicted from their land, leading to the collapse of that country's economy. But among blacks dispossessed of their land...