Only a few white farmers have been offered new farms in Zimbabwe, ZimOnline said on Tuesday.
According to the website, the Zimbabwean government promised to return land to former white farmers, but farmers on Monday said that only a handful of them had been offered new farms out of hundreds that had applied.
State Security and Lands Minister Didymus Mutasa on Sunday said his department would offer farms to former (white) farm owners who wanted to continue farming to help resuscitate the agricultural sector.
Agriculture suffered a collapse in 2000 after farm seizures began in the country.
The government, which had vowed never to return land it seized from whites, first backtracked on its position last November when it gave 99-year leases to about half a dozen white farmers who were part of a group of about 100 black farmers to receive the life-long leases.
But the white-representative Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) said in total only a handful of former white farmers had been given land out of 700 who had applied to Mutasa’s department.
”The situation is that a larger number of farmers applied for land but the minister [Mutasa] has not responded. Only a couple of farmers were recently issued with offer leases,” CFU spokesperson Emily Crooks told the website.
Mutasa was not immediately available to explain the delays in allocating land to former white farmers.
ZimOnline reported that Zimbabwe had relied on food imports since 2001, mainly due to failure by new black farmers to maintain production on former white farms.
Poor performance in the agricultural sector has also had far reaching consequences as hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans have lost jobs while the manufacturing sector, starved of inputs from agriculture, was operating below 30% capacity. — Sapa