UN to facilitate land redistribution

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General has asked the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to explore the possibility of helping to facilitate land reform programme in Zimbabwe in the wake of widespread land invasions by the country’s liberation war veterans, Annan’s spokesman said on Friday.

“The Secretary-General believes the UNDP is well-placed to play such a role because of its experience as a trusted partner in Zimbabwe, including co-chairing with President Robert Mugabe’s government the 1998 international donors conference on land reform and resettlement,” Fred Eckhard said.

Eckhard added that the conference has credibility as it is recognised by international donors, the Zimbabwean government and the Commercial Farmers Union. “The unanimously endorsed principles and processes established at that conference remain the basis for a sustainable land reform programme,” said Eckhard.

UNDP’s Administrator, Mark Malloch Brown on Thursday said the UNDP is eager to get the 1998 land reform process back on track. Speaking in New York, Brown said: “The idea of the proposal is to take the heat out of the land reform issue; take it off the political burner and onto the developmental burner.”

He added, however, that it is difficult to know how much of the programme can be implemented before the elections, scheduled for 24 and 25 June. “Donors have indicated support for the process but will not give a blank cheque at this stage,” Brown said.

The inequitable land ownership patterns in Zimbabwe have long been a source of political and economic tensions. The UN says currently about 4,460 large-scale commercial farmers, most of whom are white, own 11.2 million hectares of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land, while more than six million blacks who live in mainly communal areas, occupy 16.4 million hectares.

According to Eckhard, part of the 1998 agreement envisaged the transfer of five million hectares of land over five years that would resettle 150,000 families. “The key objective of any reform and resettlement programme must be to encourage equitable ownership patterns, incorporating both large and small scale farming that helps to alleviate widespread poverty,” said Eckhard.

Eckhard said moving beyond exploration of the issues to attract resources for an adequately funded programme will depend on changes in the broader political context that he said are beyond the competence of the UNDP to address. “Nevertheless, by initiating such a process now, the Secretary-General hopes it will help defuse the current confrontation and pave the way for a just and equitable resolution of the problem,” Eckhard said.