Only about half of the farm land confiscated by the government in one of the country’s formerly most productive agricultural areas has been occupied by new settlers, close to a month after the expiry of the first deadline for them to move on.
David Karimanzira, the governor of Mashonaland East province in northern Zimbabwe, the biggest tobacco producing region and a major source of other crops and livestock, said only 50,5% of the people allocated plots on the confiscated farms had moved on.
”We have given them a deadline up to the end of this month, failure of which the land will be given to other applicants,” he said in the daily Herald newspaper on Monday.
It is the second deadline issued in two months to the new settlers. The farm seizures include the homesteads and billions of Zimbabwe dollars of equipment from combine harvesters to thousands of tons of fertiliser.
Amid a famine in which half of the country’s 13-million people are facing starvation, agricultural output in the country once dubbed ”Africa’s breadbasket” has dropped to at least a quarter of normal, according to food monitoring agencies.
”We want production on the farms and people should be on their farms before the end of the rainy season,” said Karimanzira. The Herald has reported that a survey of the rate of occupation of seized farms in the country’s other nine provinces was not complete.
In August, local government minister Ignatius Chombo who heads the government’s resettlement committee, gave the intended new farmers a month in which to move on to the land allocated to them.
He said then ”about half” of the land seized all over the country had been occupied by new settlers.
Gerry Davidson, chief executive of the Commercial Farmers’ Union, said the real rate of occupation was likely to be much lower.
Local farmers’ associations still operating around the country ”would not even put the figure as high as half”, he said. Farms designated for new black commercial farmers had been split into at least 12 plots for their new occupiers. One property had been cut up into 61 plots.
”If there are three or four people on the land, its surprising. The end result is a serious decrease in efficiency.” On several farms one new settler has moved into the plot around the homestead, but the rest of the plots were vacant.
”A lot of these people didn’t realise the implications
of what it meant to start farming,” Davidson said. Most were unable to raise finance to begin cropping or keeping livestock, many were reluctant to start without a ready-built home and others were allocated land unusable for agriculture.
”If there had been a properly scheduled take-over this trough in production could have been avoided,” he said.
”Clearly it demonstrates it is not a land reform programme. It was done because there was an election coming.” The CFU estimates there are now about only 600 of the former commercial farmers left on their land out of about 4 000 six months ago.
The Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe said last week that about 250 000 farm workers had been made jobless by the evictions.
In August, police arrested hundreds of white farmers for allegedly disobeying eviction orders, although many of them had obtained court orders ruling that their eviction orders were illegal.
Ruling party officials, usually backed by mobs of party militants, have forced many more farmers who have not received eviction notices off their land, often at gunpoint. – Sapa