Zimbabwe has gone through a controversial land reform programme since 1999 and this has seen a general decline in its agric and other industrial output. There has been a raging debate as to whether the decline resulted mainly from the land transfers and tenure change or whether other factors have been more determinant.(Moyo 2007). Various perspectives abound as to the relationship between the agricultural and industrial decline and the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) but there is consensus that indeed there has been a plummeting effect on productivity across all the economic sectors. General industrial production is down to an average of 70% below capacity while agriculture the mainstay of the economy has suffered a 90% decline in tobacco, 71% in maize and various other declines across the board (CFU 2003). This paper seeks to augment this debate by locating Zimbabwe’s economic whores within the context of internal and external factors. The endogenous factors include the macro-economic conditions which affected the supply and use of inputs during the period, the land reallocation process itself and limited productive capacities of the new LSCF farming in the short term. Weak macro-economic conditions and policy (including agricultural policy) during this period, grossly affected the profitability of farming and of agribusiness and agricultural support agents, especially because forex shortages limited the entire range of inputs available to all farmers, while inflation and price controls resulted in a cost-price squeeze that weighed heavily against agricultural investment (Moyo 2007). However, these internal factors were exacerbated, if not triggered off in some instances by exogenous factors, whose real effects commenced prior to the fast track programme in 1997/8, including reduced external credit and aid (i.e. economic isolation) and political conflict, and later the protracted droughts and recurrent floods ( Moyo and Sukume, 2004; Moyo, 2005). The capacity of new and communal area farmers in terms of skills, own savings and credit to produce the crops formerly dominated by the LSCF have been limited. Access to investment resources (credit), has been limited partly due to the insecurity of their land tenure, and the poor political and economic conditions and policy environment. It is imperative to note that there is however a subtle connection between these factors it might mislead to look at the as exclusive and independent. These all the same have limited the potential gains of the land reform and this paper shall strive to consider these points interrelatedly. Although a gloomy picture has prevail much of the time in terms of the country’s food security position, some scholars such as Sam Moyo(2007) and Ian Scoones (2008) have been pessimistic and expect a rebound in the long run if the right policies are put in place. The paper will start by considering the more controversial internal factors and close up with more technically external causations.
Although the need for land reform has been generally a pertinent issue in Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political arena since the colonial times and the struggle for independence, commentators have been adamant that the implementation of the FTLRP was a mess because of its political nature and disruptive tendencies. Accusations abound that the allocation of land land was based on patronage and partisanship. Sithole (2008) notes that the poor peasants, who led the invasions, at the behest of Mugabe, have since been driven off the best farms. The prime properties have been reallocated to the president and his close relatives, ministers, the country's top judges and armed forces and police officers, and pliant journalists. These farms are mainly used as weekend retreats and, for the most part, have ceased to be productive. Professor Gordon Chavunduka a veteran African nationalist and former vice chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe is quoted by Sithole saying "It looks like land reform was never meant to benefit the ordinary person, land reform was only meant to benefit a few special individuals, and that may lay the ground for future conflicts." The underlying grievance is that government land reform initiatives could have been appreciated if trancparency and equitability were the prime movers. Instead in some cases in looks like the whole land reform thing was a process of changing hands of the ruling elite and capitalist class from the former white “Rhodies” to the new black aristocracy without sincere regard for the needs and cause of the landless poor in the rural reserves and farm workers.
Substantiating the above assertion, Moyo (2007) notes that most farm workers lost homes and employment, and received little land, as they were largely perceived to have been against the FTLRP (Chambati and Moyo, 2004), and tended to be relegated to being potential farm labourers by new beneficiaries (Ibid). Out of 175,000 fulltime farm workers prior to the FTLRP (Magaramombe, 2003; Chambati and Moyo, 2004), about 80,000 retained their employment in the unacquired large scale commercial and parastatal farms and on large scale plantations. The remaining 95,000 full-time workers were dispersed into communal areas, re-employed in A1/A2, and resettled, live on informal settlements or former compounds. The 170,000 part-time workers tended to relocate to communal areas, while only 5% (4,600) of the resettlement beneficiaries were former farm workers. Some provide casual labour to new farmers and live with informal rights in farm workers’ compounds. Close to 30,000 were displaced into informal settlements, while more than 20,000 joined the expanding informal gold panning industry. Thus, close to 90,000 former farm worker families at present, do not enjoy secure tenure in the rural areas. This of course is the population that one would have expect to be most needy of land allocation but for political grounds and personal enrichment were forced to find their own way of survival worse still after their form of livelihood as farm workers had been destroyed.
Another issue of contention that ripped credibility and viability of the land reform exercise was the violent nature of the process that led some to refer to it as ‘land inversion’. Violence is well known as antithetical to productivity and this has even been more dramatic and pronounced in Zimbabwe. The news of the seizure of farm properties, beatings and sporadic killings of white farmers and in cases labourers spent over the world like bonfire. This was received with virulent negative publicity especially in western countries and the rip off effect on the economy has been critical. Tourism experienced a 60% decline in arrivals as the EU, USA and their allies blacklisted Zimbabwe as an unsafe destination. The threats, plans and initiatives by government to take over the majority shareholding of all foreign companies in Zimbabwe exacerbated the situation leading to investor flight and general insecurity in the economy. In a capitalist world system, one thing that experience has shown not to be tempered with are property rights since the capitalist philosophy is centred on accumulation. The results have been an unprecedented industrial decline and a ravaging world record inflation rate and a spiralling unemployment rate together with worsening standards of living.
Furthermore, besides being violent the whole process of Fast Track Land Reform Programme was poorly coordinated, disorganised, chaotic and haphazard. A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 2002) technical report on the fast track program in January 2002 noted that the program is "affected by cumbersome consultations and decision-making processes involving numerous district, provincial and central government actors.... Problems of weak capacity and poor coordination have led to numerous errors in processing the acquisition of properties." Among the farms listed for resettlement have been properties totally unsuitable for the purpose, including land flooded under dams, land already resettled, or land currently used for industrial purposes. The team commented that even after recent amendments to the law, the land acquisition process was "complex, cumbersome and tedious to execute," and that the team "is not aware of any other country in the region where the procedure for compulsory acquisition of land is so elaborate.” A war veteran who was given a piece of land described to Human Rights Watch (2001) how he found that the same land had been reallocated to different people in subsequent weeks when he tried to go back to his plot. He had been given no written proof that the land was allocated to him. He lamented, "I felt angry because I felt there was some kind of disorder and there was no proper responsibility for the exercise."
The lack of proper coordination led to serious depletion of the national herd and misuse of other natural resources such as water and wildlife in Zimbabwe. According to Sithole (2008) because of the land reform Zimbabwe has of late been failing to meet its beef export obligations to the EU obviously resulting in loss of potential foreign exchange generation. The Commercial Farmers' Union estimated that close to 250,000 head of cattle (nearly 20 percent of the national commercial herd) had been forcibly "destocked" by late 2001, and that over 1.6 million hectares of grazing land had been burnt out (CFU statement;2001). In some cases the “new farmers” occupied conservancies and started burning forests and hunting wildlife thereby disturbing and causing imbalance in the ecosystem. Others targeted irrigation dams as fishing grounds and had nothing to do with any productive farming whatsoever.
Another major shortcoming of the land reform has been the failure by government to provide dequete support systems in terms of inputs, training and extention work. According to Zikhali (2008) others who wanted land told Human Rights Watch that they had not taken up the opportunity because they did not have the resources to cultivate the land and there was no government support to assist new settlers. The absence of legal security and government assistance could leave them vulnerable to hunger and displacement. In addition, capacity constraints faced by public extension agencies have made them unable to meet the increased demand for extension services. This situation is located in context in which the majority of the new farmers had little or no priviuos extensive farming experience and badly needed at least basic training if productivity was to be an achievable dream.
Coupled with the above problem is the fact that these new farmers were denied loans by landing institutions because of lack of collateral. Because of the way land was forcibly and extra-judicially seized, and because farmers driven off their land continue to contest the evictions through the courts, Zimbabwe's new farmers -- whether from the powerful elite or the peasantry -- do not have title deeds to their land. Title deeds are the necessary collateral demanded by banks and other private financial institutions before they will advance loans. Samson Tigere interviewed by the Human Rights Watch (2001) a Mahusekwa new farmer, said serious problems are caused by the uncertainty about future land tenure or ownership, which currently is subject to the arbitrary decisions of Lands and Security Minister Didymus Mutasa, one of Mugabe's closest lieutenants."Today I am here, but there is no guarantee that I will be here tomorrow," he said. "Mutasa can issue an offer letter to somebody else soon after I invest my money in the land. It is risky business. I would rather buy moveable assets and be ready to move at short notice." In other words minimal production was as a consequence of uncertainty of the new farmers in the face of potential evictions given lack of substantive and explicit tenure rights. Because the "fast track" process of resettlement is being carried out so rapidly, short-circuiting legal procedures, it appears that many of those who have moved to new plots or those who might otherwise do so, are worried about the lack of certainty that their title will be secure (Masiiwa 2004). As noted by UNDP (2002), "apart from discouraging settlers from taking up plots allocated to them, this is likely to defeat the productivity goals of the resettlement programme as a whole.
In the face of economic difficulties, insecure tenure and unpredictable seasons, most of the peasant farmers lucky enough to have been allowed to remain on the land they invaded have sold their fertilizer and maize seed on the thriving black market to raise money for immediate needs. Consequently, as the independent weekly Financial Gazette's trenchant columnist Mavis Makuni pointed out, "They are working the huge tracts of land allocated to them under the land reform program using their bare hands." This season, she said, they could not harvest their winter wheat crop fast enough before the spring rains caught up on them and destroyed the grain. Superior profits are being made from non-farm investments, particularly in parallel forex and commodity markets and many others have tended to sell the inputs they acquire from the government after all on a partisan basis.
Furthermore, in a bid to control production the government has arbitrarily involved itself in market controls of both inputs and produce through price controls and buying monopoly of all grains. This has led to a situations in which farmers find it economically rational to engage in other activities other than farming. According to a survey by the independent Mass Public Opinion Institute, MPOI those farmers still producing maize, Zimbabweans' staple food, refuse to sell it through the government's monopolistic Grain Marketing Board, said the MPOI survey. They instead prefer to sell illegally to private traders. They complained to survey compilers that the 33,000 Zimbabwe dollars (US$132) per metric ton offered by the marketing board is a pittance, which does not cover their costs. In addition, payments from the government agency are frequently heavily delayed and come in the form of bank cheques, requiring expensive travel into town. Black market buyers, they told MPOI, pay immediate cash at a rate of 51,000 Zimbabwe dollars (204 US) per metric ton. MPOI quotes Lloyd Phiri, a new farmer in the Mahusekwa area, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Harare, said he would like to farm properly but the government's buying prices makes agriculture unprofitable. "Why should I risk my money ploughing a piece of land when I can sell the fuel I get from government and get money for my immediate use?" he said. "Money is money, it doesn't matter how you make it. If I want a house or a car it doesn't matter whether the money is from farming or from selling fuel." Thus discordant policy management systems have negatively affected productivity thus compromising the food security position of Zimbabwe.
A look at the industrial and employment performance of the economy are unnerving. According to Chitiga and Mabugu (2008) before the onset of the fast track land reform, the agricultural sector employed a total of over 70% of the labour force. Agriculture contributed between 9% and 15% to gross domestic product (GDP) and between 20% and 33% to export earnings. The sector was an important supplier of raw materials to the industrial sector, contributing 20% of the manufacturing inputs in the1980s. By 2003, inflation had risen to 600%, forex earnings had declined by at least 50%, and the cumulative gross domestic product (GDP) declined by about 30%. This was mainly due to the disruption of commercial farming cash crops particularly tobacco which happened to be the major foreign currency earner leading to gross forex shortages which made all other industrial productions unviable. A substantive number of agro material dependent and agro-supporting industries such as beverage manufactures, banks, fertilizer manufactures and many others were driven to near collapse as their major clients were being dissipated and forex became scarce. As a direct consequence, what has happened since then in terms of the economy is nothing short of a catastrophe (Chitiga and Mabugu; 2008). Real GDP growth has been negative since 2000, reaching –14.5% in 2002, and projected at –12.4% for 2003. According to Davies (2004), real income per head in 2004 was projected to be 46% less than it was in 1996 based on government official data or 53% less if data from the International Monetary Fund were used. According to CIA (2007), the population below the poverty line was estimated at 80% in 2004, while the Gini index was estimated at 56.8 for 2003. These statistics show that poverty and inequality increased substantially between the period 1990 and 2004. Chitiga and Mabugu (2005) report that poverty levels have likely continued to rise since 2000, largely driven by the dismal macroeconomic performance, drying up of important external aid inflows and high inflation (largely a result of supply shortages (due in part to reduced agricultural farming activity and droughts) and huge budget deficits)). Given the high inflation rates that have characterised the economy since 1997 and the massive job losses, it is not surprising that income distribution has not improved during the period.
The fast track resettlement program is also seen to endanger food security for the rural and general population. An agricultural extension officer interviewed by HRW (2002) commented: "I don't think the land invasions are there to promote production, because when you invade you are disrupting production," and complained that the unregulated movement of animals to the new areas spreads diseases. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO; 2002) warned in December 2001 that "the already tight food situation has deteriorated as a result of reduced cereal production and general economic decline... 705,000 in rural areas are at risk of food shortages. In addition, 250,000 people in urban areas are experiencing food difficulties due to a sharp increase in food prices, while some 30,000 farm workers have lost their jobs and are left without means of assistance." Thus Zimbabwe formerly hailed as a food exporter and ‘breadbasket’ of Southern Africa is now importing food from its former clients some of which took advantage of fleeing farmers to strengthen their own agricultural sectors.
To a greater extent the role of the government in the chaotic land reform has been the prime cause of low productivity in industries and farms, but it is imperative to note that the majority of food producers in Zimbabwe have been communal farmers who were not directly affected by the land reform in the disruptive sense. These suffered severely, not because of land transfers but due to the frequent droughts and inputs shortages.
Although the effects of land reform on the Zimbabwean economy is deeply contested, some academic opinion seems to be shifting. According to Mamdami (2008) a recent study by Ian Scoones of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies – in collaboration with the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape – challenges some of the conventional wisdom in media and academic circles within and beyond Zimbabwe. The problem with this wisdom is that certain highly destructive aspects of reform – coercion; corruption and incompetence; cronyism in the redistribution of land; lack of funds and an absence of agricultural activity – have come to stand for the whole process. This ignores the many positive potential and this has admittedly informed by wester power and politics. Scoones identifies five myths: that land reform has been a total failure; that its beneficiaries have been largely political cronies; that there is no new investment in the new settlements; that agriculture is in ruins; and that the rural economy has collapsed. Researchers at PLAAS have been quick to point out that over the past eight years small-scale farmers ‘have been particularly robust in weathering Zimbabwe’s political and economic turmoil, as well as drought’. Ben Cousins, the director of PLAAS and one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change – who had previously argued that the land reform would destroy agricultural production – now says that the future of Zimbabwe lies in providing small farmers with subsidies so that food security can be achieved. According to researchers at the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare,(Moyo 2007) new farms need to receive subsidised maize seed and fertiliser for a few seasons before achieving full production. Some might give up during this period, but not many – partly because the land tenure system doesn’t allow land sales; only land permits or leases can be acquired.
For ZFU the future of agriculture in Zimbabwe is closely bound to the country's political fortunes: political stability, macroeconomic stability, maintenance of law and order, long term security of tenure and incentive pricing for commodities are all cited as necessary for reviving the sector. For Sam Moyo of AIAS, the way forward for Zimbabwe's agricultural production is a strategy of accommodation in terms of greater inclusion, tenure security and production incentives. "A reversal of the land redistribution is neither politically feasible nor a pre-requisite to recovery," he says, noting that sustainable land utilisation required key land, agricultural and economic policy measures to increase agricultural productivity, investment and exports. "Land redistribution should be completed by allocating land to the excluded. This includes accommodating white farmers, on the basis of parity rather than privilege; namely, through the 'one person one farm' policy." Moyo (2008)
The security of leasehold land tenure among “commercial” farmers can be improved by making leases transferable within a regulated land market and by enabling financial institutions to secure their loans. Land tenure policy should bring security of landholding among all the current landholders and those still to be included. Agriculture can become sustainable if a coherent agrarian reform strategy is implemented consistently, focusing on the main goal of improving the livelihoods of the majority. Smallholders can play a critical role in future production, if policies are supportive of them. Agricultural price controls, subsidies and, farmer and agro-industrial support should be rationalised to improve production incentives. Foreign exchange management should be rationalised and diverse external financing mobilised. (Moyo; 2007).
Thus although the fast track land reform in Zimbabwe has played a significant role in disrupting, discouraging, destroying and dislocating production both in industries and in agriculture itself, it would be a blunder to overlook the role of other factors in the drama. Within this context it would be noted that although land reform was a necessity in Zimbabwe, government would have avoided an unfortunate insecure food situation. In all this it is not too late for the government to reverse the gains of the land reform if appropriate policy measures are put in place.
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