New land grab to put 300,000 jobs on the line

Two farming experts said this week that farm workers and their families would emerge the biggest losers if the government pressed ahead with its planned land seizures. Godfrey Magaramo-mbe, director of the Zimbabwe Farm Community Trust (ZFCT) - a non-governmental body which works to improve the conditions of farm workers in Zimbabwe - and Ewan Roger of the Agriculture Labour Bureau, noted that very few farm workers had been considered for resettlement under the present fast-track exercise, the ‘Financial Gazette reported on Thursday.

About 40 000 farm workers had already lost their jobs after self-styled mobs of war veterans seized commercial farms last year and halted production in many of them, the report said. “The government is not including the farm workers in the resettlement scheme and some workers already displaced by these disturbances are already creating illegal settlements on the fringes of the commercial farms,” Roger was quoted saying. The government said last week it had targeted another 1,000 large-scale commercial farms for compulsory acquisition. Although it had listed more than 2,000 farms for seizure, the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) said only 1, 000 farms were new listings. The CFU sad the new listings brought to 5,000 the number of properties listed for compulsory acquisition under the Land Acquisition Act and represented eight million hectares of all fertile land in Zimbabwe.

According to the report, although top CFU executives refused to be interviewed on record this week, industry experts said the mainstream commercial farming community would be left with only 800 farms if the government proceeded to seize all the farms listed last week. Until now the CFU had a membership of 3,600 farmers who shared 5,800 large-scale farms employing 350,000 registered farm workers, the report said. Magaramombe was quoted saying that apart from the 40,000 farm workers who had already lost their jobs, he fully supported CFU estimates that 300,000 more would lose their jobs by the middle of next year if the government proceeded with the acquisitions advertised last week.