Maravi

(TALKZIMBABWE) Land audit premature: Made

Land audit premature: Made
TH/TZG
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:25:00 +0000

AGRICULTURE Minister Joseph Made has said it is still early days for a land audit in Zimbabwe and to judge new farmers’ production capabilities because they have been operating under harsh conditions characterised by illegal economic sanctions imposed by the West.

Made said Western sanctions had greatly incapacitated the majority of new farmers from productively using land the State had allocated to them.

"The capacity that we need has been impacted upon by the imposition of illegal sanctions. You can’t build capacity under sanctions.

"We might be wrong to say that there are large tracts of land lying idle. They (farmers) need to be capacitated and sanctions need to be removed," Made said.

The minister added that the land reform programme was not merely about changing land ownership patterns, but a reform of the whole agrarian sector.

"You must know that when you have to take up an agrarian reform you have to re-orient a whole lot of institutions.

"You need human resources, financing and so on and you can’t do that under economic sanctions," he said.

He cited Brazil as a county that had carried out a successful agrarian reform through an overhaul of its agricultural institutions.

At Zanu-PF’s Fifth National People’s Congress last December, delegates resolved that the land audit should not be held if illegal sanctions remained in place.

They argued that the embargo had affected farmers’ ability to produce.

The delegates said detractors of land reforms wanted to use the audit to reverse the gains of land reforms.

In related news, lands minister Herbert Murerwa has pointed out that anyone found leasing out land will have his/her offer letter withdrawn.

This was after it was established that some people had leased farms back to white farmers.

Under Zimbabwe’s Constitution, all farmland is owned by the State and individuals cannot rent it out to another party outside the conditions of the offer letter or 99-year lease.

Labels: AUDITING, JOSEPH MADE, LAND REFORM, SANCTIONS, ZDERA

posted by MrK @ 11:56 AM