Zimbabwe launches 99-year land leases to black farmers

Angus Shaw

HARARE, Zimbabwe — The government launched a program to issue 99-year leases to black farmers allocated land seized mostly from white farmers, state radio reported last Friday.

It said 125 leases were granted for medium- to large-scale commercial farming and another 150 applications from resettled farmers were being processed as surveying of redistributed farmland continued.

Since the land seizure program began in 2000, nearly 15,000 blacks received parcels of former white-owned land for commercial agricultural production, replacing more than 4,000 white large-scale producers. Another 141,000 families received small plots.

The official state media said President Robert Mugabe described the first leases as a landmark in his redistribution program that would improve farm production by giving new farmers security of tenure for more than a generation.

Though all farmland remains the property of the state and cannot itself be used as collateral for loans, the leases encouraged farmers to develop their properties, he said.

“I believe the farmers who receive the leases will now have the confidence to invest in important infrastructural developments,” Mugabe said.

Improvements to buildings, dams, barns, irrigation and other facilities on the land could be used to guarantee loans, he said.

A handful of displaced white farmers are expected to get leases, but not on their former properties, and white farmers’ support groups have expressed skepticism over the leases program.

An estimated 400 white farmers are still working on their original farms, but seizures have continued in recent weeks, with at least 30 receiving eviction notices from the government.

Among recipients of leases from Mugabe in a ceremony last Thursday were a number of prominent government officials and ruling party supporters including Reuben Barwe, chief correspondent at state radio and television, the nation’s sole broadcaster that is seen as central to Mugabe’s propaganda apparatus.

Ruling party militants marched through Harare last Thursday celebrating black empowerment and the success of land redistribution that corrected colonial era land ownership imbalances, the state media reported.

Marchers’ placards proclaimed: “Long Live President Mugabe” and “Revolutionaries stand together.”

Marches and demonstrations by government opponents are routinely banned by police under the country’s sweeping security laws.

The chaotic and often violent land seizures since 2000 disrupted the agriculture-based economy in Zimbabwe, a former regional breadbasket, plunging the country into its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980.

At more than 1,000 percent, official inflation is the highest in the world and compares to single digit inflation in neighboring Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia.

Zimbabwe is suffering acute shortages of food, hard currency, gasoline and essential imports.

(Associated Press)