Land reform gone wrong in Zimbabwe

In 2000 the Zimbabwean government of President Robert Mugabe embarked on a controversial effort to seize white commercial farms and re-distribute them to the majority population. Mugabe justified the seizures by citing the reluctance of former colonial power Britain to honor earlier committments to fund land redistribution. Cynics have alleged it was a populist electioneering political gambit by an increasingly unpopular president.

Political tactic or not, land reform to reverse colonial race-based landholding patterns had the support of a significant part of the population, as it does in other southern African nations with a similar colonial experience to Zimbabwe's. The expropriation of land from a privileged minority still viewed with suspicion from the colonial era also struck a responsive emotional chord in many other Africans and others from across the world.

In the years since 2000 it has become painfully apparent that the economic implications of the seizures were not well understood or prepared for. Zimbabwe's white commercial farmers may have been widely perceived as arrogant and racist, but over several decades they had also developed a sophisticated, highly mechanized and productive system of large farming estates. They were an important contributor to employment, hard currency earnings and raw materials for Zimbabwe's manufacturing industry.

In the political euphoria of the expropriations little attention was paid to all the varied factors that would have been required for continuity or a quick recovery from an anticipated dip in productivity. The seizures increasingly seemed driven by political and racial vendettas rather than concerns for social and economic justice. There were two basic schemes : one for those wishing to go into commerical farming and another for subsistence farming, the idea of the latter being to open up more land for village smallholder settlements.

Yet even the farms designated for commercial purposes were parcelled out simply on the basis of declared interest rather than proof of farming ability, experience or financial means. The prospective farmers had no title to the land and hence no access to capital as had the white farmers. Many of the prospective farmers were derisively referred to as "cellphone" or weekend farmers who applied for land because it cost them nothing and were accused of being more concerned with having a weekend hangout from their city jobs or businesses than they were to be serious farmers. Although the issue of title still remains unclear several years later, many non-farmers hoped that this would be eventually resolved in their favor, and therefore that there was eventual speculative value to holding on to a "farm" even if there was no activity on it! There have since been threats of reclaiming the land from beneficiaries who do not use it productively but this has so far proven to be little more than rhetoric, with many of the worst offenders being members of the political elite.

The aggressive and generous support from successive Rhodesian-era governments that had helped to build the white farmers into a potent farming, economic and political force over many years was lacking for the beneficiaries of the land reform from the Zimbabwean government. The vast majority have found themselves completely un-equipped on many levels for the model of commercial farming that had been practiced by the white farmers.

The best developed farms in the most fertile areas often ended up in the hands of the politically well-connected, who often seemed more interested in the proceeds of pre-existing investments than on doing any serious farming themselves. The white farmers had built up relationships with commercial banks on which they depended for capital improvements and operating capital that the banks were reluctant to extend to unproven farmers with no security of tenure on their new farms, no experience, no collateral and in the prevailing atmosphere of general confusion and mixed political signals from the government.

The result of all this has been a precipitous drop in agricultural productivity and economic performance which the government seems ill-prepared to address and reverse. There has been a high attrition rate as many prospective farmers realise that it is far from as easily lucrative as it might have first appeared. Hyper-inflation and the Mugabe government's pariah status in much of the western world have only compounded the economic problems, worsening the difficulties that were caused by the manner that the then-reigning agricultural model was disrupted, and with no well thought-out plan to replace it.

There is slowly emerging a small core of serious and successful black commercial farmers, but they are going though their learning curve in a hostile business, economic and political environment rather than a favorable one. They will emerge into a new farming elite, but perhaps with some of the baggage that made the white farmers a wealthy but unpopular and therefore politically vulnerable group. The new corps of black commercial farmers may be working smaller estates than their white counterparts did, but they in general are working according to the same farming model. This for instance means low farm worker wages are even more critical to their success than it was for the white farmers who were operating in a more stable economic environment, yet hyper-inflation means that the low pay of today is almost a starvation wage.

Many employees of the former white farmers find that their wages in this hyper-inflationary environment are not worth the effort of being a farm worker. In addition the struggling new black farmers are not in a position to offer anywhere near the same level of "fringe benefits" such as housing, access to farm schools and clinics that some of the established white farmers had begun to be able to and feel forced to do by social and political imperatives. In addition to all the other problems plaguing agriculture, a "shortage" of farm labor has become another as former laborers resort to other means of survival.

The sustainablity of the large farming-estates had begun to be questioned from several angles (the socio-political questions around the huge size of choice landholding amongst a privileged racial minority, the dependance on low wages, etc) but this debate has been obscured by all the new issues that have been forced to the forefront by Zimbabwe's agricultural and economic crisis since 2000.

Many lessons are to be learned from the Zimbabwean experience, and nearby countries with similar social, political and historical experiences are watching developments there with keen interest. Whichever way things develop in the next few years, there is little doubt that the Zimbabwean experience will influence the debate about post-colonial land reform far and wide.

Chido Makunike

African Agriculture