AFRICAN EYE NEWS SERVICE, Blantyre | Wednesday
MALAWI has appealed to the World Bank and other international donors for US$25m to help resettle an estimated 21 000 landless villagers as the core of its land redistribution programme.
Malawi’s land ministry principal secretary Henry Juwa said the country urgently needed to purchase 14 000 ha of arable land to head off rural unrest by an estimated 17 000 to 21 000 landless villagers and small farmers.
Land invasions by liberation war veterans in neighbouring Zimbabwe damaged southern Africa’s key tourism industry, sparked regional currency devaluations and led to threats of similar invasions in surrounding countries.
Juwa stressed that Malawi was already facing budgetary constraints and did not have the funding itself, and had launched negotiations with the World Bank and other donors for assistance.
Speaking after a one-day land reform workshop in Blantyre, Land Minister Thengo Maloya said continuing land shortages had created regional food security problems, environmental degradation and rural crime.
Landless villagers were unable to grow their own food or generate income, and are therefore forced to rely on government or donor handouts, he said. Even where villagers did have marginal arable land, there was not enough to farm sustainably. The resulting rural poverty was forcing people to consider crime or urbanisation.
Maloya said Malawi was therefore urgently reviewing the country’s archaic land laws enacted by the previous British colonialist government and would soon table redrafted land legislation.
White settlers had, he said, therefore been able to acquire massive tracts of excellent arable land and still used cheap labour from indigenous people who were forced off the land only to become labourers.
Maloya claimed the problem was compounded after independence, when the Hastings Banda government failed to reform or controlled land transactions in either rural or urban areas.
“This failure to deal with land policy problems in the 1960s and 1970s may have indirectly contributed to the problems of poverty, food insecurity and inequities in access to land we have today,” he said.
Small-scale resettlement and restitution has already begun, with government granting roughly 175 hectares to 400 rural families in the southern Thyolo district last week. The government bought the land from commercial farmers for US$54 500.