Government's response on land "positive"

Zimbabwe has responded “positively” to a letter written to President Robert Mugabe on the land issue by the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy Mark Malloch Brown, a senior UNDP official told IRIN on Friday. The government’s response this week to Malloch Brown’s observations on the land issue was “basically positive and conciliatory and appears to be a step in the right direction,” the official said. UNDP Administrator Malloch Brown visited Zimbabwe at the end of November last year as Kofi Annan’s special envoy on the land crisis, and held an intensive round of talks with government, farmer representatives and civil society groups. In a letter he wrote to Mugabe after his visit, Malloch Brown acknowledged the appropriateness of the government’s land reform programme and its target of redistributing five million hectares of commercial estates to landless communal farmers, but that it should be conducted transparently, fairly, and with the goal of poverty alleviation. He also pointed to the difficulties of winning donor support without existing law and order issues brought under control. The Zimbabwe government’s response this week was that its “fast-track” land programme, in which according to its own figures it has resettled 70,000 families on expropriated private land, would continue. But the government also noted points raised in Malloch Brown’s letter on enhancing capacity to deliver on land reform, and the involvement of “stakeholders” in the process, the official said. “These are very broad acceptances and it will depend on how this translates into action,” the UNDP source added. For more details on the Zimbabwe government’s position on land reform visit: http://www.gta.gov.zw/Headlines/main_update_page.htm