Political interference a major problem to Zim farming
http://www.zimeye.org/?p=25524
By Gerald Chateta
Published: January 1, 2011
Harare – The Commercial Farmers Union says because of political
interference and disturbances which characterised the commercial farming
sector in 2010 Zimbabwe will once again this season rely on food aid.
“The rains have been fine, even the small scale farmers were assisted with
inputs, so there might be a slight improvement but once again I am 100%
convinced that we will be unable to feed ourselves which is unfortunate
given the fact that we have the potential to feed ourselves and we can
export and earn foreign currency, but this won’t happen again this season
unfortunately. As long as politics remain at play the country’s agric sector
will not fully recover,”CFU President Dion Theron said in an interview.
Zimbabwe has been depending on food aid from the donor community since the
year 2000 when it embarked on the controversial land reform program which
was engineered by war veterans.
The chaotic land reform program which ZANU-PF justified as a correction of
land imbalance between the blacks and former colonial masters has been
blamed by observers as the root cause of famine despite good rain seasons.
The international community whose citizens were the most victims of the land
reform described it as racial as it targeted white farmers only.
Theron said it was disappointing to note that land invasions continued in
2010 despite the new political dispensation.
“Its the production that gets affected, investors might move on and engage
into something else but production suffers. We had farmers getting harassed
and taken to court and these are highly productive farmers we are talking
about, and this has affected the full recovery of the agric sector, “he
added