Ongoing hardships for beleaguered White minority
HARARE , 16 July 2007 (IRIN) – Scores of white commercial farmers who left Zimbabwe after their farms were seized as part of President Robert Mugabe’s land reform policies are returning home as the promise of greener pastures elsewhere in southern Africa fails to materialise.
Justice for Agriculture (JAG), an independent organisation established to support about 4,000 farmers left landless after implementation of the 2000 fast-track land-reform programme to redistribute land to blacks, said about 100 farmers who had left to settle in other countries in the region had returned to Zimbabwe.
“It never rains but pours for the commercial farmers. Following numerous constraints that almost turned them into paupers in countries like Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi, the farmers decided to come back, and more could be returning,” JAG chairman John Worswick told IRIN. It is not known how many farmers left the country as a result of the land-reform process. “Their difficulties were mostly financial: after being invited by some private organisations to help boost agricultural production [in other countries, particularly in tobacco farming, they set up farms but were later dumped by their financiers and had no choice but to pack their bags and head back to virtual emptiness here.”
Although the prospects for the farmers in Zimbabwe appeared bleak because of the country’s economic meltdown and the absence of investment opportunities, he said there was optimism that farmers would, in the end, be given back their properties.
Most Zimbabweans are trying to cope with an annual inflation rate of around 4,000 percent – the highest in the world – and there are widespread shortages of basic commodities and foreign currency.
“Long-term prospects are bright for the commercial farmers. Justice will one day prevail, even if it means twenty or thirty years. We have seen private individuals being given back their properties in countries like Mozambique and Uganda, decades after oppressive governments had taken them over,” Worswick said.
Most of the commercial white farmers ejected from their farms kept the documents proving their ownership of the property and have challenged the seizure of their land in both local and international courts, although the ZANU-PF government has repeatedly vowed that the land acquisitions would not be reversed. Beneficiaries of the land redistribution exercise receive 99-year leases on the farms where they have been resettled.
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