Growing calls to help displaced farm workers

The growing number of farm workers displaced by land invasions in Zimbabwe has prompted agricultural groups to call for immediate humanitarian assistance to deal with the crisis. “There’s certainly a role here for international organisations, these people urgently need feeding programmes and shelter,” Godfrey Magaramomba of the Farm Community Trust (FCT), a Harare-based NGO, told IRIN on Tuesday.

The FCT has been trying to assist former farm labourers in Hwedza, 100 km southeast of the capital. Self-styled war veterans and ZANU-PF supporters evicted about 2,000 families from 14 commercial farms in the area two weeks ago.

Magaramomba said that those evicted were now living in appalling conditions in makeshift camps and squatter settlements along main roads. “We’ve been held up from helping these people by pro-government provincial authorities and by war veterans on the ground,” he added.

Evicted farm workers have told FCT that after being labelled opposition supporters by war veterans, they are then told not just to leave the farms, but to leave the area completely.
Analysts told IRIN that making large numbers of farm workers destitute effectively disenfranchised them. “Kicking people out of where they live and vote appears to be a new tactic aimed at diluting opposition support in rural areas,” one observer said.

Over 2,800 commercial farms have been listed for compulsory acquisition. About 200,000 workers and their dependants, about 1.5 million in total, live on these farms. If they are displaced and only a handful are given land, Zimbabwe faces a social catastrophe, some analysts warned. They argue that only a gradual land reform programme, helped by generous donor funding, could manage a smooth transition without creating more poverty. But donors have shunned President Robert Mugabe’s fast-track scheme and accused his government of placing the political imperative of resettling land as swiftly as possible above the goal of poverty alleviation.
The Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) told IRIN that it was also extremely concerned about the plight of evicted farm workers.

The organisation has begun collecting donations from its members to try and offer some support to the growing number of displaced. “We’ve got some food, blankets and (plastic) sheeting up to them in Hwedza but it’s a drop in the ocean,” Ewen Rogers of the CFU’s labour bureau said.

Rogers wants to see agencies like the World Food Programme (WFP) initiating feeding schemes in places like Hwedza. “If there was a natural disaster to blame for this crisis, the international community would respond, so why not in this case?” he asked. Other CFU officials told IRIN that the Zimbabwean government was unlikely to agree to international humanitarian assistance because it “would show the world the human cost of Mugabe’s land policy”.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told IRIN from Harare that it currently had no programmes in place to help evicted farm workers but that the situation could change. Other international agencies working in Zimbabwe were reluctant to speak on the issue, citing political sensitivities.