<I hate to waste long responses to obscure threads, so here goes. I was writing about the west's responsibility for creating the Zimbabwe mess in another thread, and got somewhat carried away. Anyway, I'd been meaning to write something like this for a while because, while Mugabe deserves to be condemned, I've found that most people are not aware of how this crisis developed and seem especially vehemently opposed to even thinking about the west's responsibility for the crisis. Moreover, many seem to be unaware that it seems finally to be coming to closure with the appointment of long time opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister.>
One of the striking aspects of research sources on land reform is that there was a near unanimous consensus among experts, from the World Bank on the right, to the South African Department of Land Affairs on the left, to British overseas development aid in the center, that Zimbabwe had carried out one of the best land reform programs in history from the early 80s to the about 1990.
By most measures like productivity per acre, improved living standards, equity, national and household food security, Zimbabwe's land reform program had improved the economic profile of the country. The World Bank urged South Africa to adopt a program modeled after Zimbabwe's.
Zimbabwe's land reform program was both mandated by, and carried out under constraints imposed by, the Lancaster House Agreement, which ended the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe civil war.
The liberation forces wanted redistribution of land to landless Africans. Unlike in South Africa, where white farmers had taken most of the land from Africans over a hundred years ago,
in Zimbabwe, the theft of the land was generally within living memory and many soldiers had fought specifically to get land back for their families and communities that they had witnessed being stolen by the Rhodesian government and handed over to white farmers. Under Rhodesian law, the country was divided into white areas and black reserves, with the 5% of the white population receiving about 50% of the land, generally the best farmland in the country, while the 95% of the population that was African was assigned to scrub land called "reserves" even if it meant forcibly expropriating and removing black farmers without compensation.
The outgoing white minority government wanted to protect the economic interests of white farmers, even if it could not protect their actual holding onto the land.
The compromise at Lancaster House was that Zimbabwe would carry out massive land reform, but white farmers would be, not only monetarily compensated, but compensated in either US dollars or British pounds sterling, in case they wanted to emigrate.
This meant that under the international agreement, the US and Britain were required to fund Zimbabwe's land reform -- because Zimbabwe would never have the foreign exchange to pay for it. The US immediately welched on the deal and never provided a dime of US dollars (shortly after the deal, Reagan had become president). Britain then began to fund land reform in foreign exchange.
Zimbabwe's government devised a careful, multi-dimensional land reform program that purchased large scale white farms, carefully divided them into family sized farms and turned them over to land-poor black farmers from the "reserves," and established roads, schools and other infrastructure for the famers -- all funded by the British in foreign exchange. By at least 1990, small scale African farmers had overtaken white farmers as the main producers in the country -- their output surpassed white farm output.
This was predicted by economists on both the right and the left because
white farmers in Zimbabwe are massively inefficient and many are incompetent. Even competent white farmers are handicapped by the size of their farms, which was designed to be large enough to provide an income for a "civilized" or "European" lifestyle. They each own between 1,000 and 20,000 acres, hire a few black farm families (who if they had land would be perfectly capable of farming it themselves), plant a hundred or so acres using imported tractors and imported fuel, run a few hundred head of high grade cattle over the empty remainder, and often hold the rest of the land as game reserves for hunting parties of wealthy whites from the cities or overseas. A 1,000 acre farm can either hold one white farmer or perhaps 50 - 100 African farmers who use every acre intensively, and rely on family labor and animal traction. Similar math goes for bigger farms which generally are in the 5,000 to 10,000 acre range.
Mugabe was generally credited with implementing this land reform program. He did, however, use some of the targeted land for patronage purposes, selling some of the big farms to political supporters. (So, btw, had Ian Smith's government, and so did the apartheid government in South Africa, when they took land from Africans as late as the 1980s). In fact, the Mandela-Mbeki governments in South Africa also published regulations saying that in addition to small scale African farms, they thought it was important that SA's land reform program experiment with creating some large scale African owned farms.
The British and American governments complained that some of the land wasn't getting to small scale land reform recipients. These complaints escalated into a pissing match.
Eventually the British government under John Major, encouraged by the US, decided to cut off the flow of dollars and pounds that funded land reform -- expecting Mugabe to cave quickly, because land reform was the centerpiece of his government and his greatest achievement. Meanwhile, the Lancaster House constraints had expired.
From the southern African perspective, the British and Americans had sacrificed a program that was helping tens of thousands of Zimbabweans because of their scruples over corruption -- even though by Rhodesian, South African or even American (campaign finance/Halliburton) standards, the initial amount of corruption wasn't that much worse.
Instead, Mugabe decided to accelerate land reform -- without compensation, planning, or the many safeguards and procedures that had made the first phase of land reform so successful. The results are well known.
This then degenerated into a full fledged political and economic crisis. One of the reasons that despite Mugabe's increasingly brutal rule he continued to retain the support of a very large segment of the population is that many Zimbabweans benefited from land reform and wanted it to continue and accelerate, and worried that any opponent of Mugabe would bring back the rule of white farmers. By loudly and publicly siding with the white farmers against all economic common sense or political rationality, the British and Americans, then tainted the real democratic opposition, which was rooted in the black trade unions under the leadership of Morgan Tsvangirai, who thanks to the west was made to look like a stalking horse for white farmers who wanted a return to the old regime.
This is why the American and British outrage at Zimbabwe is considered laughably hypocritical throughout southern Africa. For 60 years, the west aided the naked theft of land from Africans and it's corrupt distribution at nominal prices to white farmers, then promised to buy it back through land reform, then in the case of Americans immediately welched on the deal, then in the case of the British crashed and burned one of the best land reform programs in history in a pique of moral superiority. That's why the democratic governments with generally good human rights records in the region, like South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, refused to jump on the anti-Zimbabwe bandwagon.
Everyone knows that economically, the white farmers have to be gotten rid of, one way or another, in all of those countries. They are a huge drain on the economy. Those developing countries cannot afford them for very long, economically or politically. The fact that the west continues to seem to pine for "Out of Africa" fantasies of white farmers in Africa makes the leaders of these countries worry about western support for their own land reform programs and use a jaundiced eye to look at any claims of moral condemnation emanating from Britain or America. In other words, as much as they dislike Mugabe, they dislike western disapproval of land reform even more.
Sam Moyo, a leading expert, recently was interviewed and said:
You've closely studied agricultural production in Zimbabwe. What are your thoughts on the reasons for the decline in food production and the Western perception of that?
Moyo: This question is complex and needs a nuanced response.
To begin with, close to 70% of the food consumed by the 80% of Zimbabweans who are the working classes (peasants, formal and informal wage workers, the unemployed) and over 50% of the middle class foods, which comprise mainly grains (maize, sorghum, groundnuts and pulses as oils or for direct eating) and local relish (greens) have always been produced by the peasants and urban residents' gardens. Apart from feeding themselves (65% of the population), the peasants sold over 70% of the marketed grain and groundnuts and the little locally produced rice (over 90% of which was always imported). Secondly, peasants provided most indigenous fruits (Mazhanje, Masawi, etc.), as well as most of the meat and milk consumed in rural areas.
True, large white farmers produced and sold most of the higher protein-value, largely urban-consumed, foods: milk and dairy products; wheat; temperate fruits and jams (apples, oranges, etc.), tea and coffee, sugar, meat (beef, poultry, and pork products), and oils and fats (from soya beans, sunflower, and so forth). The middle and upper urban-based classes consumed most of this LSCF (Large-Scale Commercial Farm) production.
But don't take my word for it -- here's a cut/paste of a few footnotes from one of my studies of land reform in the region, which are definitely worth checking out to get a more fact-based view of what happened:
Bowyer-Bower, Implications for Poverty of land reform in Zimbabwe: Insights from the Findings of the 1995 Poverty Assessment Survey Study, in T.A.S. Bowyer-Bower & C. Stoneman Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Constraints and Prospects (2000);
Robert E. Christensen, Implementing Strategies for the Rural Economy: Lessons from Zimbabwe, Options for South Africa, 21 world Development ;
Susie Jacobs, The Effects of Land Reform on Gender Relations in Zimbabwe, in Bowyer-Bower & Stoneman, Land Reform in Zimbabwe;
T. Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe : A Comparative Study (1985);
T.A.S. Bowyer-Bower, Theory into Practice: Perspectives on Land Reform of the Farmers’ Unions of Zimbabwe, in Bowyer-bower & Stoneman, Land Reform in Zimbabwe;
J. G. M. Hoogeveen; B. H. Kinsey, Land Reform, Growth and Equity: Emerging Evidence from Zimbabwe's Resettlement Programme - A Sequel, Journal of Southern African Studies
van Zyl J., 1996, ‘The farm size-efficiency relationship’, in Agricultural Land Reform in South Africa
Moyo, S., 2000, ‘The Political Economy of Land Acquisition and Redistribution in Zimbabwe, 1990-1999.’ Journal of Southern African Studies,
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