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(NEWZIMBABWE) Anti-Mugabe fog clouds land reform success: Researchers

Anti-Mugabe fog clouds land reform success: Researchers
23/01/2013 00:00:00
by Jonathan Steele I guardian.co.uk

ELECTIONS will be held in Zimbabwe later this year, leading with grim predictability to another bout of Mugabe-phobia in the British media.

The trigger for the presidential and parliamentary poll was the deal struck last week between the veteran President and the leader of the rival Movement for Democratic Change, the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, on a new constitution.

After months of wrangling the two men, who have been running the country in an uneasy coalition for the last four years, agreed on a text. It has not yet been published, so doubt remains on whether it reduces the president's power in favour of parliament, as the MDC wanted. But whatever it contains, the document will have to be put to a referendum.

Then follow elections, and there are already strong hints that they could again be marked by violence. Mugabe seems determined to stand once more, admitting he is vulnerable but saying he will fight like a “wounded beast”.

Meanwhile, a group of 58 civil organisations last week condemned what they called a "well-calculated and intensive" assault on human rights activists and journalists as voter registration gets under way.

As passions risk becoming inflamed again and the old battle positions resume in Britain's media as well as Zimbabwe's, the danger is that long-term trends get overlooked.

Good news has just emerged from the country showing that the land occupations and evictions of white farmers by angry veterans of the liberation struggle that was the big Zimbabwe story of a decade ago did not destroy the country's agriculture, as so often claimed. Far from it, production is now back to the levels of the late 1990s and more land is under cultivation than was worked by white farmers.

The evidence is contained in Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land, a book based on several research studies in various parts of the country. The authors look at Zimbabwe's first land reform right after independence in 1980, which was not so fiercely contested, as well as the changes sparked by the veterans' occupations in the late 1990s, which Mugabe's Zanu PF party originally ignored but later took over and turned into a political weapon.

The authors criticise Mugabe's economic mismanagement, which led to hyperinflation between 2005 and 2008. It was not the land reform that caused hyperinflation, but bad economic decisions. They say the introduction of the US dollar by the unity government four years ago brought a quicker economic recovery and hence greater benefits for farm producers than anyone expected.

They have the courage to criticise Amnesty International for exaggerating the plight of farm workers who were forced off formerly "white" land taken over by Africans, and say that by 2011 the number of people working on resettlement land had increased more than fivefold, from 167,000 to over a million.

They have a go at a prominent BBC report which, they say, fell for the myth of a cornucopia when white people ran most of commercial agriculture and a "black disaster" thereafter. White farmers never used all the land they had taken. In the years just before minority rule collapsed, in spite of generous government subsidies, 30% of white farmers were insolvent and another 30% only broke even. Some 66% of arable land was lying fallow.

After the occupations in 2000, although some new African farmers reverted to subsistence agriculture, a growing number have been moving into commercial farming and there has even been a healthy return to the land by urban black people.

In part this is because land is still highly prized in Zimbabwe and the desire to recover it was so crucial an element, ideologically and emotionally, in the struggle against white settlement.

Indeed, the authors start their book with an arch reminder of an earlier generation of war veterans who evicted farmers and burnt their houses.

They included the former Rhodesian white minority leader Ian Smith and other champions of white minority rule who got their economic start in life in 1945 by defining African farmers as squatters and throwing them – without compensation – off land that the foreign settlers' government designated as the exclusive preserve of white people.

"Regaining the land was central to the independence struggle in a way that was never the case in Mozambique and South Africa … Mozambique's urbanised elite simply do not think of farming," they write.

In spite of the progress of recent years the book argues that Zimbabwean farming still faces major challenges of investment shortages and training. It takes a generation for farmers to master their land and 10 years is too short a period to judge the complete success of the occupations. But the record is far better than the outside world gives credit for.

While Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land focuses on a specific controversy, its challenge to conventional wisdom and stereotyping offers wider lessons. It is a reminder that crisis coverage, even when accurate, is only a part of what the media should be about. Follow-ups and reports on long-term trends are equally needed.
• Jonathan Steele covered Zimbabwe's elections in 2000 for the Guardian

Labels: LAND REFORM, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 2:35 PM