The Zimbabwe government plans to amend land laws to allow it to confiscate more land from white farmers, according to details of an amended Bill published by the state-run Herald on Monday. A major change would be the scrapping of a requirement that a preliminary notice of acquisition by the government should be served on the farm owner.
”This provision has proved difficult to implement … because often the owner no longer occupies the land and cannot otherwise be located,” reads the preamble to the Bill.
The Bill proposes that a preliminary acquisition notice be published in the Government Gazette, which is a weekly publication sold by the government printers.
It also states that the total land that the government initially said it wanted to acquire from white farmers for black farmers ”is the minimum hectarage only”.
The government had indicated that it wanted to acquire 11-million hectares, or 30%of Zimbabwe’s land, from about 4 500 white farmers.
A recent audit by a government appointed team said the amount of land owned by white farmers was down to roughly 1,2-million hectares (on 1 377 farms) after the reforms were launched in 2000.
Whites used to own a third of the country’s land — 70% of prime farmland — before the government launched a land reform programme in 2000 for redistributing it among new black farmers.
Early this year the government said that it had concluded its land reforms, but it has continued to publish lists of farms it intended to acquire. Many of the dispossessed white farmers have sought land in neighbouring countries such as Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana.
The country’s land reforms have been partly blamed for a massive slump in the country’s agricultural production in the last two years. – Sapa-AFP