Land reform fails rural Zimbabwe
Tuesday April 19, 2005 13:22 - (SA)
HARARE - Thousands of Zimbabwean families are still sharing small patches of farming space five years after their government launched land reforms to allocate white-owned farmland to black families, a newspaper reported today.
Zimbabwe embarked on its land redistribution programme in February 2000, taking away prime farmland owned by some 4,500 white farmers and handing them over to the landless black majority.
Five years after the launch of the land reforms, at least 75 percent of Zimbabweans live in rural areas with limited farming land, according to independent analysts.
"The government intended to resettle 50 percent of peasants onto farmlands created after white commercial farmers moved out," The Daily Mirror said.
But the newspaper said only a fraction of those targeted for resettlement on larger tracts of farming land have done so while the remainder is still living in congested areas.
"The fast-track land resettlement programme has failed to decongest the densely populated rural areas by at least 40 percent," the newspaper said.
"Estimates vary from province to province but at national level, a rate of 10 percent decongestion has been achieved," the newspaper quoted Sam Moyo, director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies, as saying.
The government's land reforms have been blamed for compromising food production in what was once the southern African region's breadbasket.
White farmers owned some 70 percent of the most fertile land in the country before they were implemented.
But critics say the land reforms have benefited members of Mugabe's inner circle and their cronies.
A government land audit report released late last year showed that some 4.2 million hectares (10.4 million acres) of land had been allocated to fewer than 200,000 black commercial farmers and ordinary agriculturists.
Of some 4,500 large scale commercial white farmers operating in Zimbabwe five years ago, there are about 600 now left, accounting for three percent of the country's land.
Many have relocated to neighbouring countries and as far afield as Nigeria.
/AFP/
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