Don’t be fooled: Zimbabwe’s land reform is no success
http://www.groundup.org.za/content/don%E2%80%99t-be-fooled-zimbabwe%E2%80%99s-land-reform-no-success
July 31, 2013 –
Jack Lewis
OPINION
It is election day in Zimbabwe. This is a good day to reconsider the
Zimbabwean land reform experience and what to make of it, especially as we
consider what should be done about land reform in South Africa.
When you think of Zimbabwean land reform, you think about the “fast track”
reform from 2000 that saw the majority of commercial farms either broken up
and handed in smaller allotments to about 125,000 small farmers and 50,000
larger small-holders, or grabbed by members of the Zimbabwean elite. How did
this come about?
A little report in Tuesday’s Times is revealing. Erina Murwira, now in her
80s and living on the outskirts of Harare will be voting for the MDC. Why?
“I stopped supporting Mugabe a long time ago … he has not taken care of us
old people. He has failed us,” she said. She has not forgiven Mugabe for
stopping her pension in the 1990s. To understand why Erina’s pension was
stopped we need to understand why the fast track land reform became a
political necessity for the ruling Zanu-PF dictatorship. It had little to do
with justice and a new economic path, as some naive researchers have
suggested, and everything to do with bloated plutocrats hanging on to the
state at any cost.
Following independence in 1980, the new government in Zimbabwe resettled
52,000 families on 2.5 million hectares purchased from European commercial
farmers. Plans called for the acquisition and resettlement of an additional
five million hectares. Initially it was a great success. The UN’s Food and
Agricultural Organisation reported that smallholder maize production doubled
from 738,000 tonnes in 1980 to 1.3 million tonnes in 1986 and that
underlying this was “the inheritance of a productive public agricultural
research system, a quadrupling in the number of government-provided loans to
smallholders, a sharp increase in guaranteed producer prices and a 30-fold
increase in the number of Government Marketing Board (GMB) grain-buying
depots and collection points.” The government also spent money on education
and health.
Why did the government falter? A large part of the reason, and one that is
given far too little importance by contemporary writers on Zimbabwean land
reform, was the coup which Mugabe initiated in 1982 in Matebaleland against
the Ndebele stronghold of Zapu, the main opposition party led by Joshua
Nkomo. Over 20,000 people were butchered in the “Gukurahundi” and Mugabe’s
regime became a de-facto dictatorship. It shocks me that most writers on
Zimbabwe’s 2000 land reform, Mahmood Mandani being a notable exception, are
largely silent on the anti-democratic nature of the Mugabe regime which has
looted the Zimbabwean state for private gain.
By 1990, the government was broke with debt service obligations consuming
33% of its budget. Zimbabwe was obliged to seek help from the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank which demanded structural adjustment.
Erina Murwira’s old age pension was a casualty of these IMF imposed cuts.
Markets were deregulated and public expenditure reduced. At the same time
drought and poor agricultural yields further restricted government revenue.
Between 1991 and 1996 manufacturing shrank by 14% and GDP per capita
declined by 5.8%. Government spending on education declined by over 30% as
wages for teachers were slashed and health spending declined. In desperation
it printed more money to keep social spending going, starting a vicious
inflationary spiral, already 50% by 1999.
A parasitic ruling clique had by 1999 seized all organs of state. It was
hugely unpopular and effectively lost the 2000 elections to the newly formed
MDC: it was only the appointment of 30 seats from amongst the chiefs that
gave Mugabe control of Parliament. It was this shock that precipitated the
fast track land reform to shore up the rural vote which was in near revolt
against Mugabe’s misrule.
The result of the land reform was massive economic dislocation. However,
recently a group of researchers led by Ian Scoones in the UK has stimulated
discussion on Zimbabwe land reform. Scoones found that many recipients of
small holdings have in fact increased production and are better off as a
result of receiving land.
It would indeed have been surprising if the perhaps 160,000 smallholder
beneficiaries from among the very poor and 51,000 beneficiaries from among
small and medium-scale black farmers had not increased production. But this
increase in smallholder production, which is still wholly inadequate to feed
Zimbabwe, has come at the cost disrupting the link between Zimbabwean
agriculture and industry. It has further undermined state revenue and made
impossible any of the support to smallholders that had been responsible for
the large increases in production in the 1980-85 period.
Over a decade since the land redistribution, up to 70,000
households—perhaps 350 000 people–remain displaced, living in poverty on
the urban peripheries of Zimbabwe’s cities and towns. But the total
displacement was far greater. Many more, perhaps two to three million, did
not receive land and lost their livelihoods in the cities and were forced
into economic migrancy, mainly in South Africa and Botswana. Many others
were forced into labour tenancy, non-wage and casual work on the
redistributed land. This loss of population has reduced domestic demand and
contributed to loss of revenue for the state.
Loss of agricultural output from large scale farms not made up by small
holders
Prior to land reform, Zimbabwe produced not only sufficient maize, wheat,
and other grains, but a surplus was exported. Since land reform there has
been a critical dependence on imports. Approximately 1.8 million tonnes of
maize are required annually to meet the country’s needs against the current
national yield of a little more than 300 thousand tonnes per year. Since
2000, there have been 13 consecutive years of food deficits and the United
Nations has recently appealed for more than $100 million dollars to feed 1.7
million Zimbabweans in 2013. Production of wheat continues to be constrained
by lack of access to inputs and an unstable power supply, arising from a
bankrupt state that cannot maintain and invest in infrastructure.
It is a standard refrain from those arguing for the great gains made by
smallholder agriculture that these figures are not to be trusted. But
Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance, Tendai Biti, wrote this year that “We have
received the second crop assessment report, which records the unacceptable
situation of a major decline in agricultural output… Our strategic grain
reserve is less than 40,000 metric tonnes. We are in the process of
importing 150,000 metric tonnes of maize from Zambia.”
One of the main contributing factors to agriculture’s massive decline is
that the majority of the new farmers did not have the capital necessary to
fund operations and could not access funding because of the chaotic manner
in which the expropriations were carried out. The state claims title to all
farmlands, only making land available to new farmers by way of leases. The
state therefore denied those farmers the collateral security necessary to
access working capital for farming operations.
Shrinking economy and job losses equals less state revenue and greater
fiscal debt
750,000 jobs were lost between the peak employment in 1998 and 2011. Only
14% of the workforce has a paid, permanent job in the formal economy. Using
the most generous definition of informal employment, at least half the
workforce does not have a job. The collapse of the commercial farming sector
has contributed significantly to a steep decline in state revenues, the
collapse of state services and hyperinflation as the government desperately
printed money to keep going, and eventually the abandonment of the
Zimbabwean dollar in 2008 in favour of the US dollar and the rand.
A recent study by the Development Bank of Southern Africa found that the
Zimbabwean government “currently employs an estimated 250,000 people
generating a wage bill of more than US$960 million, working out at more than
70% of revenue collections, 60% of the total budget, and more than 15% of
GDP.”
Zimbabwe Government Debt to GDP averaged 80% from 1990 until 2011, reaching
an all time high of 151% in December of 2011. The relevance of this for land
reform is that there can be no question of government support for
infrastructure, veterinary and agricultural support services, grain silos,
transport and so on–things that Scoones and others would agree are
essential–because the state is bankrupt.
An economy driven into the informal sector and reliant on smallholding
agriculture cannot provide the revenue to sustain a modern state. The mining
sector, driven by foreign multinationals despite the enrichment disguise of
“indigenisation” does not on its own do anything to promote local industry.
Of course the blame for all this does not lay solely with ZANU-PF and its
ruling clique. If there had been greater international support for land
reform, more willingness from large scale farmers to redistribute and
support both small scale and larger black farmers as well as less pressure
from the IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation to liberalise and
reign in expenditure on agricultural support, things might not have ended up
as they have.
Be that as it may, it doesn’t change the reality that there is no
independent small scale route to greater well-being once large scale
commercial agriculture has been undermined. From an analytical point of view
it seems Scoones and others seems happy to ignore all of this when
discussing the impact of land reform, taking increased production and
incomes for smallholders as if this is the only socially relevant criteria.
It seems to me to be historically blind to argue that there is a Korean path
for Zimbabwe. Korean land reform occurred with the United States fully
committed to its success in an era of sustained global economic expansion
and driven by cold war era concerns. None of these conditions pertain to
Zimbabwe.
The meaning of all this for South Africa should be clear, especially when
taken against the smaller proportion of the population dependent on the land
for a living. Land reform requires the state to have the capacity to provide
post settlement support, secure title and cheap capital. Zimbabwe shows that
undermining the large farms undermines the capacity of the state to provide
these things. Zimbabwe’s smallholders deserve a state that provides such
support. And it cannot be a Zanu-PF-Mugabe state.