Zimbabwe - Agriculture and Land
A total of 4.1 million people in Zimbabwe were expected to be unable to meet their food needs during the peak impact of the El Nino induced drought from January to March 2017. An estimated 60 percent of the population of approximately 12 million survive on subsistence agriculture and approximately 75 percent rely directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihood. Like in many African countries, the majority of Zimbabweans depend on a few staple foods. "Mealie meal", also known as cornmeal, is used to prepare sadza or isitshwala, as well as porridge known as bota or ilambazi. Sadza is made by mixing the cornmeal with water to produce a thick paste/porridge. After the paste has been cooking for several minutes, more cornmeal is added to thicken the paste.
This is usually eaten as lunch or dinner, usually with sides such as gravy, vegetables (spinach, chomolia, spring greens/collard greens), beans and meat that has been stewed, grilled, roasted or sundried. Sadza is also commonly eaten with curdled milk (sour milk), commonly known as lacto (mukaka wakakora), or dried Tanganyika sardine, known locally as kapenta or matemba. Bota is a thinner porridge, cooked without the additional cornmeal and usually flavored with peanut butter, milk, butter, or jam. Bota is usually eaten for breakfast.
Most commercial farmers reported in 2022 the government had still not compensated them for losses suffered from the land resettlement program in the early 2000s. In 2020 the government, the Commercial Farmers Union, and other farmers’ groups signed a $3.5 billion compensation deal for farms expropriated in the decades following independence. The deal promised half of the payments after one year and the remainder over the course of the next four years. In June 2021, the government made a one-million-dollar token payment to commercial farmers but continued to delay additional compensation payments as of year’s end. Despite the negotiated agreement, government officials continued to seize and downsize farms without fair compensation.
The Commercial Farmers Union estimated there were fewer than 400 active white commercial farmers still living in the country. Those remaining continued to be targeted, harassed, threatened with eviction, and evicted by unemployed youth and individuals hired by politically connected individuals standing to benefit from farm seizures.
High-level ZANU-PF officials, meanwhile, registered numerous farms in the names of family members to evade the government’s policy of one farm per official. The government continued to allow individuals aligned with top officials to seize land not designated for acquisition. Media commonly reported high-level government officials possessed large farm holdings. The government began a comprehensive land audit in 2018 to reflect land ownership accurately, but as of year’s end, the commission had not completed the exercise.
Agriculture is no longer the backbone of the Zimbabwean economy. Large-scale commercial farming has nearly collapsed since 2000 under the government's controversial land reforms. Corn is the largest food crop and tobacco had traditionally been the largest export crop, followed by cotton. Tobacco production in 2006, however, slumped to its lowest level--about 50 million kg--since independence, off from a peak in 2000 of 237 million kg, before recovering to 57 million kg in 2009.
Despite provisions in Zimbabwe's previous constitution that prohibit the acquisition of private property without compensation, in 2000 the government began to sanction uncompensated seizures of privately owned agricultural land, serially amending the constitution to grant the government increasingly broad authorities to do so after the fact. The authorities subsequently transferred many of the farms seized to government officials and other regime supporters. In April 2000, the government amended the constitution to authorize the compulsory acquisition of privately owned commercial farms with compensation limited to the improvements made on the land. In September 2005, the government amended the constitution again to transfer ownership of all expropriated land to the government. Since the passage of this amendment, top government officials, supporters of President Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, and members of the security forces have continued to disrupt production on commercial farms, including those owned by foreign investors and those covered by bilateral investment agreements. Similarly, government officials have sought to impose politically-connected individuals as indigenous partners on privately and foreign-owned wildlife conservancies.
In 2006, the government began to issue 99-year leases for land seized from commercial farms. These leases, however, are not readily transferable. The government retains the right to withdraw the lease at any time for any reason. The government's program to seize commercial farms without compensating the titleholders, who have no recourse to the courts, has raised serious questions about respect for property rights and the rule of law in Zimbabwe. As a result, Zimbabwe ranked 87 out of 189 countries considered with respect to the country's ability to protect minority investors in the World Bank's 2015 Doing Business report.
The farming sector accounted for around 40 percent of Zimbabwe's gross national product and farmers also supplied neighboring countries with their produce. But today Zimbabwe imports large quantities of maize, a wide variety of fruit and other food products. For observers like Matondi, responsibility for this reversal lies with one of the government's most ambitious projects. In 2000 President Robert Mugabe turned the agricultural sector upside down with his highly controversial fast-track land reform program. In the last 15 years more than seven million hectares (17.3 million acres) of land were redistributed. The official justification for this was that it was compensation for colonialism.
Robert Mugabe launched the fast-track land reform in 2000. Some 4,500 white farmers were dispossessed, sometimes forcibly, and a million black Zimbabweans were settled on their land. A number of new medium-sized farms were created but by and large the land was redistributed to small-scale farmers – and to people who had good connections to the Mugabe regime.
Since the reform, the farming sector has never really got back on its feet – and that is having a negative effect on the economy as a whole. According to the International Monetary Fund, the annual growth rate is only around four percent and exports are not so much food products but rather tobacco, platinum and gold.
Nevertheless, the overall picture is grim - 80 percent of Zimbabweans today live in poverty. As a result of the land reform, some 300,000 black farm workers lost their jobs. Like the dispossessed white farm owners, they received no compensation for their losses. black farmers were given land but "there is no clear tenure system that guarantees that the land belongs to them," Zamchiya told DW. That meant farmers were uncertain whether they would be able to use the land in the long term or whether their wives and children would inherit on their deaths. Tenure is hitched on the political party that you support.
Less than 40 percent is currently being used productively. One reason for this is that no real work is being done on many of the new large farms now in the hands of members of the political elite. Small farmers lack the necessary know-how and do not have enough capital to purchase the equipment they need, seeds, fertilizer or fuel. They get no support from the government.
Since the 1990s there have been a number of studies, some by the World Bank, which have showed that smallholders work more efficiently than commercial large-scale farmers. However their potential is not being used to its full extent. Before the fast-track land reform, there was a strong lobby for commercial farms. Unlike smallholders, they received financing "for their farm operations, for infrastructure, or for irrigation development.
While both commercial and indigenous farmers raise cattle, there is a radical difference in the value of such cattle to their owners. Communal farmers tend to view their cattle as more of an asset than a commodity, and value them for draft power, sources of fertilizer, and symbols of wealth. They are more likely to send an animal to slaughter to cover a specific debt or to host a specific event. According to one economist, commercial farmers traditionally sent approximately 20% of their stock annually to slaughter-houses, while indigenous farmers slaughtered only 2% of their stock annually.
Commercial dairy farms occupied a unique situation vis-a-vis the land resettlement program. President Mugabe had reportedly stated that dairy farms are of strategic importance, although nobody had been able to corroborate where or when such a statement was made. However, pursuant to this unconfirmed policy, dairy operations had been largely untouched by the GOZ's attempts to dispossess all white commercial farmers.
Still, due to the lack of centralized control over the resettlement process, some individual farmers have been targeted by both renegade war vet groups and high-profile GOZ supporters, some of whom attempt to seize the entire asset -- dairy operations, dairy herd, equipment, and all. In one case, a farmer without a Section 8 notice was told by war vets on November 13 that he had 48 hours to vacate his dairy operation. The farmer desperately scrambled to sell his productive dairy herd to other dairy farmers, knowing that generations of breeding would be lost if the cattle were simply sent to slaughter. The farmer eventually learned that the farm was being claimed by Godfrey Chidyausiku, the GOZ-appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
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