ZIMBABWE: Consensus reached on land reform

Tension over land reform between Zimbabwe's commercial farmers and the government is set to ease following recent cabinet approval of a framework plan which the farmers' union describes as "significant". "We now have a policy document we can work with," Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) official Jerry Grant told IRIN. "Land reform can be done properly without destroying the basis of the economy." Land ownership was at the heart of Zimbabwe's liberation war. To this day, nineteen years after independence, some 11 million hectares of prime land is owned by around 4,500 mostly white commercial farmers. Over six million black Zimbabweans are crowded onto barren communal areas, reinforcing rural poverty and reflecting an unchanged colonial legacy. The issue has become highly politicised. Last year the government threatened to compulsorily acquire 1,471 listed farms and pay only for infrastructure but not the land itself. At a land conference in September, donors pledged financial support for reform if government policy met transparency and poverty-alleviation criteria, with the land purchased at market rates. The new Inception Phase Framework Plan, to be part funded by donors, calls for the resettlement of 77,700 rural families on a million hectares over two years. The land includes 120 farms amounting to 223,112 hectares voluntarily offered for sale last year. The balance would be met by, among other sources, further uncontested acquisitions from the government's revised list of 800 farms for compulsory purchase, and novel approaches to better utilise existing farm land. At the heart of the plan is a strategic and sustainable approach to land reform to combat rural poverty. According to Sam Moyo, who led the technical team which prepared the framework report: "Because of delays over land reform people have lost the memory of the discrepancy over land holding and how skewed it is." He told IRIN that around half of commercial farmland is under-utilised. He argues that many of the farms listed by the government last year were multiply-owned by a single farmer and several were in the hands of multinational corporations. The concentration of land ownership affects "efficient farm management," he said. The CFU has consistently warned that agricultural production, the basis of the Zimbabwean economy, would suffer if land was handed over wholesale to under-resourced communal farmers. But Metekaire Kuda, the director of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, said that under the framework plan selection for resettlement would be based on farming experience and qualifications. It must also be backed by basic credit support. "We don't want to recreate communal areas but a vibrant agricultural industry," he told IRIN.