Zimbabwean Finance Minister Simba Makoni on Thursday urged farmers in his country to keep on working, hours before a midnight (2200 GMT) deadline for thousands of white farmers to surrender their farms to the Zimbabwe government.
”Side by side with land reform, every farmer currently on land should work that to the maximum. We do not expect them to stop farming,” he told reporters after a meeting of southern African finance ministers in the South African capital Pretoria.
A Zimbabwean court ruled on Wednesday that the Harare government must notify mortgage-holders of any farm seizures, effectively giving many farmers a four-month reprieve.
Makoni conceded the land reform policy would bring a drop in agricultural production at a time when millions of Zimbabweans are threatened with famine and the country is 1,6 million tons short of its staple crop, maize, but insisted the policy had not caused the food shortage problem.
”We are not slowing on land reform,” he said. ”To expect us to stop land reform because of the famine is not on.
Makoni said farmers whose properties were considered too big would still be able to farm a portion of them.
”A farmer sitting on a 12 000-hectare farm in an area where the optimum size is determined as 300 hectares will lose 900 hectares but will be able to stay and farm the remaining 300 hectares,” he said, denying that white farmers would be dispossessed.
”Equally a farmer with three farms will be required to
relinquish two of them and will then be able to farm one of them.
”Nobody has a definitive number of farmers who will be leaving the land,” Makoni said. ”Anyone who gives you figures in this highly volatile situation is merely flying as kite.”
”The criteria for optimum farm sizes apply across the board, that is, to black owners and white,” he said when asked if government ministers with large farms would also lose some of their land.
Makoni said no accurate estimate existed for the amount of mortgaged land affected by the reform policy.
”I have been breathing fire at the banks to get the figures of their exposure. These range between 15 billion and 30 billion Zimbabwe dollars,” he said.
The minister said the government was committed to compensating farmers for developments on expropriated land, adding that this could be used ”to liquidate some of the borrowing”. – Sapa-AFP