Who owns the land?
Posted: Thursday, August 8, 2002

Population: Black 99.4%, White 0.6% Best Farming Land: 70% White 'owned'

Zimbabwe's white farmers own much of the country's best agricultural land.

According to government figures published before the current crisis, some 4, 400 whites owned 32% of Zimbabwe's agricultural land - around 10m ha - while about one million black peasant families farmed 16m ha or 38%.

But much of the white-owned land is in more fertile areas with better rainfall, while the black farming areas are often in drought-prone regions. So in terms of prime farming land, whites own a disproportionate share.

Where they do exist side by side, huge, modern, mechanised estates are divided by a mere fence from subsistence farmers living in mud huts.

The situation was created in colonial times when blacks were forced off their ancestral lands.

"The land question" was a major cause of the guerrilla war which led to Zimbabwe's independence in 1980.

Twenty years later, little has changed.

Who pays?

Land reform and redistribution is expensive: farmers asked to give up some of their property demand compensation; and infrastructure, such as roads, bore-holes, schools and clinics, is needed for those who are given the land.

President Robert Mugabe says Britain should pay because it was in charge when the problem was created.

He also points out that the colonialists did not compensate Africans when they first took the land.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's government responds that £44m has been provided for Zimbabwe's land reform since 1980, and that much of the redistributed land has so far ended up in the hands of cabinet ministers and other government officials. MORE 

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