Last white farmers kicked out

The owners of the targeted farms have been told they cannot lodge objections
to the orders.

At Upper Romsey farm, at Lions Den, about 120 kms north of Harare, Reinier
Van Rensburg, who has been evicted by the Mugabe regime, squints out at the
wasted, grabbed land on his last day here.

“It’s just very disappointing,” said Van Rensburg, 37. “I feel betrayed by
the government. All we were doing was growing food for the country. We were
not getting involved in politics or anything. What did we do?”

The renewed land grab, which began in earnest after Mugabe’s stunning
electoral loss on March 29 to the MDC but accelerated in the week leading to
last Friday’s illegal presidential election run off, has included land owned
by a Roman Catholic church mission outside Harare, Anglican church property
north of the capital, which features a top school for poor teenage girls,
several white-owned nature preserves and part of a sugar plantation partly
owned by South Africa’s Anglo-American Corp.

Eric and Joan Harrison, a couple who spent 30 years building a successful
citrus and sugar cane operation only to see thugs supported by Mugabe, said
the new seizures did not comply with land reform laws that say farms being
redistributed must be carved up by surveyors and provided with roads and
materials to keep them productive.
“There is no carefully thought out resettlement program that lawful process
requires,” he said. “They are just listing farms to destroy them.”
The government has admitted its land redistribution program is broke.

The state District Development Fund, whose trucks were to be used to
transport local farmers to nationalized farms, said recently that most of
its vehicles were out of commission because of shortages of spare parts and
tires as well as misuse and corruption by officials.
The state Agricultural Rural Development Authority, intended to provide
seeds and tools, said it too was critically short of supplies.
“You can’t just give people pieces of land and nothing else. There are no
resources to kick start them,” a regional commercial farmers union official
said.
Banks have categorically stated that they had frozen loans to farmers who
defaulted on their repayments during production disruptions caused by the
squatters and to farmers whose properties had been listed for seizure.
Farmers require the annual loans to buy the seeds, fertilizer and equipment
necessary to plant and harvest their crops.

Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980.
Inflation has soared to a record 2 million percent, unemployment reached 85
percent and health and education services have declined sharply.