OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Saturday
ZIMBABWEAN President Robert Mugabe’s government has announced that it is to grab another 57 white-owned farms, including large chunks of two of Anglo American’s most intensive sugar and citrus estates – ignoring assurances that it will seize only properties that are under-utilised and which are part of multiple holdings.
Notices published in Friday’s edition of the state-controlled Herald newspaper brought to 2 011 the number of properties officially earmarked for “compulsory acquisition” by the government for resettlement.
The list includes 38000ha of Hippo Valley Estates, owned by South African-based mining conglomerate Anglo American Corporation, and is 70% of the land owned by one of the country’s two large-scale sugar estates.
The two estates produce about 500000 tons of sugar annually, half of it for export.
Anglo American is down to lose another 207ha from its Mazoe citrus estate in the fertile Mazowe valley, about 40km north of Harare, where it produces internationally renowned citrus for export.
Hippo is in the south-eastern Lowveld area, where thousands of hectares of game ranches were also listed for confiscation.
The region has been subjected to lawlessness in the last month, with thousands of trees felled and vast areas of grassland burned by war veterans who have divided the land into plots for local villagers to plant maize.
Agriculture Minister Joseph Made last week said the government intended seizing 2 226 farms, a total of seven million hectares or nearly 90% of commercial farms, owned mostly by whites.
The Commercial Farmers’ Union says land earmarked for confiscation includes intensively farmed horticultural, tobacco and dairy operations vital to the country’s earnings of foreign exchange.
The listing is the first step in a complex legal and bureaucratic process in which the government has to obtain the approval of the High Court for each confiscation.
However, the CFU fears that appealing to the law will have little effect as more than 1 700 farms have already been illegally occupied by war veterans.
Dozens of affected farmers have abandoned their properties.