Land reform: going beyond the policy impasse
http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/
For most commentators, Mugabe’s fast track land reform programme was an
unmitigated disaster. Thousands lost their jobs and homes, food production
nose-dived, laws on property rights no longer seemed to apply and the
economy spiralled out of control.
11.01.1208:10am
by Special Correspondent
However, recent studies have shown a different, more complex picture of the
situation on the ground. For the first time, all the academic studies that
have been carried out on FTLRP over the past 11 years have been gathered
together in the Journal of Peasant Studies, edited by Lionel Cliffe, Jocelyn
Alexander, Ben Cousins and Rudo Gaidzanwa. The group hopes the collection
will lead to further debate and analysis of the issues so a workable way
forward can be found.
One of the most recent studies was carried out by a team lead by Professor
Ian Scoones at the Institute of Development Studies. Zimbabwe’s Land Reform:
Myths and Realities challenges the myths that there is no investment,
agricultural production has collapsed, food insecurity is rife, the rural
economy is in precipitous decline and farm labour has been totally
displaced.
They carried out a detailed study looking at 400 new farmers in Masvingo,
who had taken over land from commercial farmers that was previously
dedicated to cattle ranching with little agrarian output.
Blasio Mavedzenge, a field researcher for the Zimbabwe Department of
Agriculture who worked with Scoones, spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Crossing
Continents recently about what they found.
“The large scale farmers were not practicing any cropping at all. A huge
diversity of crops is now being produced from the same land. The land is
being better utilised now than before. It caters for more people now than
before,” he said.
He called the programme “a roaring success”. The BBC interviewed one of the
new farmers in the area. Shadrack Ruwafa works on a former commercial farm
which has been sub-divided into about 200 plots.
He said: “The Zimbabwean struggle has always been about land. Land is our
factory. We are farming people and land has always been important to us. We
did not just come without talking to the then farm owner. We went to him and
asked him can we share the land and that is how we came here. He accepted
there was no violence.
“We are doing some great farming here. We had 68 trucks to take the produce
away from the farms. The white farmer was only planting about 12 hectares
and now look at all the produce that is coming out of the land. There was
one farmer here and now there are about 200. We have far exceeded what he
was doing.”
Mavedzenge said the study showed political persuasion did not seem to be a
factor in land redistribution. “No one was asked which political party they
belonged to. Once they heard land was available, people came from north,
south, east, west. We were at pains to find things like that,” he said.
However, he admitted he could not say that cronyism wasn’t a factor.
Although there are significant geographical gaps in the areas surveyed,
studies included in the journal show the great majority of the beneficiaries
were not members of the ruling elite. In their introduction, the editors
found most studies concluded land went to “poor” Zimbabweans, with
Manicaland as an exception.
In A synopsis of land and agrarian change in Chipinge district, Zimbabwe,
Phillan Zamchiya finds: 50 per cent of the beneficiaries are listed as civil
servants including members of security branches, 22 per cent traditional
authorities; veterans received 17 per cent of the land and only 11 per cent
of the recipients were listed as “ordinary”. However, the editors
acknowledged a number of gaps in research that need to be looked at.
Despite a number of positive findings in the reports, more than a million
people in Zimbabwe will require food aid between now and March 2012 with 12
per cent of the rural population unable to buy food, according to the World
Food Programme. The Institute for Development Studies says just over one
third of new farmers are making a living from their land, 20 per cent are
juggling their farms with other work but 40 per cent are barely managing.
Zimbabwean economist John Robertson told the BBC: “The areas where there has
been something that can be called success are very small and very few. Most
of the new people farming the land that was confiscated from large scale
farmers are producing enough for themselves and not much more.” “We have got
all these thousands of people, desperately trying to make a living. But it’s
all at a very low level. We have halved output, it has been a disaster.”
He points to the mass displacement of farm workers, most of whom lost their
jobs and homes in the land invasions. One farm worker, who did not wish to
be named, told the BBC they were living in an old tobacco shed on the farm
they used to work at, hiring themselves out as labour to the new farmers for
little or no money. He said: “Before land reform, we didn’t have any
problems with our employers, it was very nice. We got union level wages so
we did not have any problems. Our employers even used to pay our children’s
school fees and even hospital bills.”
However, studies have shown that some farm workers did benefit from land
reform. In some of the schemes surveyed in the journal, in Masvingo they
constituted 11 per cent of A1 beneficiaries; in Mazowe a smaller proportion;
in one scheme the proportion was 30 per cent.
The editors of the journal concluded that a lot more analysis needed to be
done on the land situation in Zimbabwe but added: “It is to be hoped that
this collection can prompt some potential applicable ideas for policy, but
also further debate around options – especially about ways forward beyond
what most contributors see as a policy ‘impasse’.”