White Zimbabwean commercial farmers have created more than 4 000 jobs in neighbouring Mozambique, where they settled after being ousted from their land back home, a regional governor said on Tuesday.
”The Zimbabwean farmers with about 1 000ha of land each have so far generated a total of 4 118 new jobs,” said Soares Nhaca, governor of the central Mozambican province of Manica, where the farmers settled.
Nhaca said there are about 100 Zimbabwean farmers in the fertile districts of Manica province, growing traditional cash crops such as tobacco, cotton and maize.
Most of the new jobs are on tobacco farms, the governor said, adding that some farmers also grow mangoes and millet for export to South Africa.
The majority of the Zimbabwean commercial farmers have been alloted land in the two districts of Barue and Sussundenga, near the border with Zimbabwe.
Mozambique has taken a cautious approach to requests from white farmers for land, hoping to avoid replicating Zimbabwe’s inequitable pattern of land ownership, in which the tiny white minority owned more than one-quarter of the nation’s land.
In 2000, the Zimbabwean government accelerated a land reform programme under which land was seized from white farmers and redistributed to landless blacks.
Since then, more than three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s 4 500 white commercial farmers have been expropriated of about 11-million hectares.
All land in Mozambique belongs to the state and cannot be sold.
The Constitution only allows land to be leased.
Manica province, which borders Zimbabwe, is the most sought-after by foreign farmers.
Nhaca said his government has also received land requests from South African farmers.
The whole of central and northern Mozambique possesses land with almost the same characteristics as those in Manica — good soil and climate. — Sapa-AFP