The Sunday Mail
Dr Jeanette Manjengwa
Land reform is one of the major successes of Independent Zimbabwe and should be celebrated because it redressed historic racial injustices, and can increase agricultural productivity and reduce poverty.
In the biggest land reform in Africa, 6 000 large-scale commercial farmers have been replaced by almost a quarter of a million farmers.
Land reform resulted in bigger small farms as well as smaller large farms, leading to better land use and increased commercial production.
At Independence, white farmers were using less than one-third of their land, and most were not doing very well — one-third were insolvent and one-third were only breaking even. Some 75 000 families were resettled in the 1980s, but the majority were resettled during the Fast Track Land Reform Programme of 2000.
The change was inevitably disruptive at first, but crop production is increasing rapidly and is now returning to pre-Fast Track levels, and resettlement farmers already grow more than 40 percent of the country’s tobacco and 49 percent of its maize.
History matters, and any transfer of land from large farms or plantations to small farmers is rarely peaceful. The British military occupied Zimbabwe in 1897 and began more than 80 years of white minority rule. In an explicitly racial division, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 allocated the best half of all farmland to white settlers, and the worst half to the much larger group of black Zimbabweans.
After the Second World War, in the period 1945-55, more than 100 000 Zimbabweans were removed so that land could be given to white Second World War veterans.
This is within living memory and many people can remember their parents being moved, often violently, from their ancestral lands. Many of those children became the liberation war fighters in the 1970s, winning Independence in 1980.
During the 1980s, not enough land was given back under the “willing-buyer, willing-seller” process of land acquisition prescribed by the Lancaster House peace agreement. The land offered to the Government at an affordable price was primarily poorer land with less successful farmers and most good farmland remaining in white hands.
In addition, Zimbabwe was under international pressure. In the 1980s, apartheid destabilisation and open military attacks by South Africa disrupted transport and the economy, and Zimbabwe built up international debts, which, in turn, led to World Bank-imposed economic structural adjustment, which squeezed the economy.
Poverty levels increased from 26 percent in 1990 to 55 percent in 1995.
Another aspect of history was important: most of the land reform farmers grew up on farms and had experience of farming. Zimbabwe’s Independence struggle was led by people with a predominantly rural background, compared to the urban leadership in South Africa and Mozambique. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is unusual in that agriculture is seen as a means of accumulation – that farmers can be relatively prosperous. Thus many people returned to the land as part of the 2000 occupations and the successful resettled farmers are passionate about their land and farming.
The mix of a highly educated people, with some farming experience, who believe that they can have a better life on the farm than in the city has been a driving force behind the success of the land reform.
There are some negative impacts of land reform on the environment, such as increased water use for irrigation, use of wood as fuel for curing tobacco, and unsuitable land uses such as cultivation in rangelands and forests.
Natural resource use needs to be monitored and environmental management enforced to ensure environmental sustainability. The land reform also came at a time of changing attitudes toward women and gender relations. Women do most of the farming and Zimbabwe’s land reform empowered women.
Some acquired land as female-headed households; others joined their husbands and the law required that both had their name on the title document.
The new farmers are accumulating from below – investing their own money from salaries and off-farm activities and reinvesting farm profits. Resettled farmers are still constrained by cash, draught power, and markets. The most successful farmers could do better, while the potential of the farmers in the middle is huge.
There is need for continued support to resettled farmers, such as more inputs, machinery, irrigation, and credit, which will enable the new farmers to grow and be more productive. Small commercial farmers are leading the way to rural development and food security – but they do not act on their own, and need Government support. Credit and technical support are particularly important.
Zimbabwe has abundant ground water resources. Small-scale irrigation can cover the dry periods as the rains are becoming increasingly erratic due to climate change.
Irrigation development would require substantial investment in dams, boreholes, pumps, and other irrigation equipment. But it also requires a process of training and support for farmers on water management – how to participate in committees, about water rights and responsibilities, and building trust and capacity building to ensure that stakeholder water management works.
Land reform farmers are increasingly growing tobacco instead of maize, as growing tobacco is considered to be more lucrative than maize. Food production is more complex, and normally requires subsidy. Zimbabwe has done this successfully in the past.
Shortly after Independence, in the 1980s, Government made a policy decision to switch maize production from white commercial farmers to communal farmers. This was done by a high guaranteed purchase price for maize, backed up with seed, fertiliser, and technical assistance from Agritex.
The result was a spectacular success, turning some communal farmers into serious small commercial farmers. The Grain Marketing Board in recent years traded subsidised fertiliser and seeds for maize.
For the 2013-2014 season, 1,6 million households, including A1 resettlement and communal farmers, received 10kg of cereal seed and 100kg of fertilisers from Government.
This must have contributed to last year’s good production.
Zimbabwe’s experience of land reform, where large farms were broken up and replaced by many more small farms, provides an important contribution to the global debate about land, agricultural productivity and global food security, because small farms are proving to be more productive than the larger farms they replaced. Zimbabwe’s land reform provides lessons and a model for other countries, particularly in neighbouring South Africa and Namibia.
◆ Jeanette Manjengwa is co-author, with Joseph Hanlon and Teresa Smart, of “Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land”, Kumarian Press, Stylus Publishing, Sterling VA; Jacana Media, South Africa, 2013. She wrote this piece for The Sunday Mail.
