Focus on farm workers' call for inclusion in land reform

After a history of neglect, Zimbabwe's commercial farm labourers risk losing out yet again, this time in the form of the government's land redistribution programme. The land reform process has so far failed to effectively address the plight of the 350,000 farm workers and the estimated 200,000 to 300,000 casual labourers whose jobs are threatened by the "fast-track" programme, analysts warn. As next month's deadline approaches for 2,900 white farmers to vacate their estates, commercial farm workers have urged the government to include them in the land redistribution scheme. "We would like to see farm workers also resettled," Gertrude Hambira, deputy secretary-general of the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers' Union of Zimbabwe, told IRIN. "Farm workers have been denied an income and also need to be included in [the government's drought-related] food distribution programme." Land expert Sam Moyo, who helped draft the government's original framework for land reform, said that only two percent of farm workers had been allocated land under the fast-track scheme. Government policy has called on the farm workers to remain on the estates. But Hambira said that had not been uniformally applied, with tension in some districts where the new settlers had forcibly evicted labourers. Even where the workers had remained and been employed by the new resettled farmers, she said, the latter could not afford to pay the monthly minimum wage of Zim $4,300 (US $78 at the official rate). Hambira alleged that in some cases children of farm workers were being exploited as labour. "The policy is not very clear. What is needed is a public statement from the government to say what should be done," an analyst with the Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe (FCTZ), an NGO working with farm labourers, told IRIN. "We have been pushing for the inclusion of farm labourers in the land reform programme. At least they need security of tenure." He added: "The assumption the new settlers will provide jobs is just an assumption. In reality it will take a long time ... Nothing has really changed [in terms of improving labourers' historically marginalised status] or benefited them in this process of land reform". The situation is complicated by the limited links that many farm labourers have to the communal lands, the impoverished "reserves" that colonial legislation assigned the majority of black people to live in, and the government's reforms seek to address. Historically, many farm labourers originated from neighbouring countries. But the failure of commercial farmers to register children born on their farms has denied them birth certificates and access to identity documents. "Only a small percentage of farm labourers can go to their communal homes," Hambira said. According to Moyo, "many commercial farmers kept them as serf labour and didn't bother for 20 years to make sure that these people were registered. But by definition [as they were born in Zimbabwe], most of them are Zimbabweans." A study in eastern and central Mashonaland found that 40 percent of farm labourers "maintained some links" with the communal areas, the FCTZ analyst said. "However, it's not saying they actually have communal homes," he added, and pointed out that women in particular do not traditionally have access to land. If the purpose of land reform was to decongest the communal areas, then forcing farm labourers to return runs counter to that stated aim, the analyst said. "The reason people moved to the farms in the first place was because of the overcrowding," he commented. Meanwhile, media reports this week have focused on the closure of more than 500 schools on formerly white-owned farms that has robbed an estimated 250,000 children of an education. The FCTZ official said this was one of the many "ironies" surrounding the land reform debate. Human rights groups have for years lobbied commercial farmers to set up proper registered schools on their estates, but in the majority of cases they had been rebuffed. What was provided was sub-standard education, and in the cases where the children did not have birth certificates, they could not graduate to government-run secondary schools. Inadequate education led to early pregnancy among girls, and for boys "early labour", the analyst said. But, he added, regardless of whether the schools provided by the commercial farmers were up to scratch, their closure has meant that "the children are going to be the losers".