Land tenure the only answer

The co-authors of Zimbabwe’s Land Reform, Handlon and Smart, are doctors of spin – trying to justify what was an illegal, violent and racist land grab, that dispossessed over 4,000 food producers and their one million employees and dependents and crippled a country.

Two mortal blows led to Zimbabwe’s economic implosion. The first was the farm invasions. Disastrous and unplanned fast track appropriation of productive farmland took place under the guise of Land Reform. The second was the unbudgeted payouts made to placate angry and frustrated war veterans. In almost the blink of an eye the currency started to depreciate against hard currencies and the once vibrant economy began to self-destruct. What should have been a noble cause turned into a fiasco. It was a scramble by the rich and the powerful for the biggest and the best agricultural enterprises rather than a well-executed exercise to resettle and economically empower the majority of rural Zimbabweans. In fact the rural folk were subjected to a gargantuan confidence trick in order to curry votes and favour.

Agriculture, the bedrock of the economy, was relentlessly pilloried. Soon crop volumes dropped alarmingly causing basic commodities to become scarce and expensive.

Forward to 2013! Farmers now have to rely on contract farming because normal market practises are impossible when security of tenure exists no more. Respected Zimbabwean economist John Robertson has pointed out that although there are now buyers numbers for 80,000 mostly small-scale tobacco producers there are actually only 60,000 producers. Twenty thousand of them have two numbers each so they can do a spot of side-marketing. The contractors provide the inputs to grow the crop and in standard Zimbabwe corrupt style the producer takes the inputs, grows his tobacco and sells some of it under his other number all of which is profit. If the contractor is not wide awake and on the spot he is unlikely to recover the cost of the inputs he doled out: regardless of the price he pays. Since the producer has no title he cannot be dispossessed of his land to force payment of what he owes.

So it is a short term system used by a few industries (breweries, tobacco, oil seeds) desperate for some product to keep their businesses going and their machinery in use. Bit contract farming is not secure. I know of a farmer who leased land off a beneficiary, and also paid a proportion of the rent to the real owner. He thought he was safe. When the crop was nearly ready he was kicked off his plot. The financiers lost their money and the farmer landed up with the experience. The bottom line is there is no certainty without title and the rule of law.

There was a meeting of the Zimbabwe National Farmers’ Union (erroneously purporting to represent Zimbabwe’s entire agricultural industry) where those attending all admitted that they were now bankrupt and unable to plant anything at all. The solution they believed was for government somehow to compensate farmers for their farms and in this way they hoped they would then be given title. They made it clear that they did not want title to use the properties as security for bank funding; they just wanted either to be able to sell their free farms or lease them back to the dispossessed white owners. But they were adamant farming was a mug’s game and they wanted no more of it. They had at last established that farming is not the money spinner they were led to believe!

2012 is predicted to be the worst for agricultural output in Zimbabwe since the fast track land reform programme started. – MIKE ROOK, UK (Former CEO Zimbabwe’s The Farmer magazine)