Zimbabwe’s land reform: challenging the myths

Most commentary on Zimbabwe’s land reform insists that agricultural production has almost totally collapsed, that food insecurity is rife, that rural economies are in precipitous decline, that political ‘cronies’ have taken over the land and that farm labour has all been displaced. This paper however argues that the story is not simply one of collapse and catastrophe; it is much more nuanced and complex, with successes as well as failures. The paper provides a summary of some of the key findings from a ten-year study in Masvingo province and the book Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities. The paper documents the nature of the radical transformation of agrarian structure that has occurred both nationally and within the province, and the implications for agricultural production and livelihoods. A discussion of who got the land shows the diversity of new settlers, many of whom have invested substantially in their new farms. An emergent group ‘middle farmers’ is identified who are producing, investing and accumulating. This has important implications – both economically and politically – for the future, as the final section on policy challenges discusses.ESR

Livelihoods, Land and Political Economy: Reflections on Sam Moyo’s Research Methodology

This article focuses on the methodological lessons from Sam Moyo’s scholarship. Sam’s research is characterised by a combination of detailed empirical investigation, deep knowledge of the technical and practical aspects of agricultural production and farming livelihoods, and bigpicture political economy analysis and theory. Sam’s method is an insightful contemporary application of the method originally set out in Marx’s Grundrisse. Many contemporary explorations of agrarian political economy fail to sustain the important tension and dialectical debate, between diverse empirical realities and their ‘multiple determinations and relations’ and wider theorisation of the ‘concrete’ features of emergent processes of change. The implications of Sam’s methodological approach for the analysis of Zimbabwe’s land reform are discussed, especially in relation to the land occupations and the politics of agrarian reform since 2000

A goal programming model for planning management of Miombo woodlands

This study used a Goal Programming approach to investigate the effects of changes in agricultural policies and labour supply due to deaths in farming households, on use of woodlands under two regimes; namely one where utilization of forest resources was restricted to within sustainable levels and under another where this restriction was relaxed, i.e. an open access situation. The study sites for this work were Mutangi in Chivi district and Mafungautsi in Gokwe district. The Mafungautsi community borders the Mafungautsi State Protected Forest and is relatively better-endowed with woodlands than Mutangi. The results from the study indicate that households in communal areas are highly differentiated with regards to ability to satisfying family sustenance goals; relatively poor households depend on woodlands for a significant part of their income needs but richer families are more efficient in harvesting woodlands; increase in agricultural product prices or increase in crop yields tend to increase harvesting of woodland products among the better off and reduce woodland harvests by the poorer households; increase in input costs tends to increase reliance on woodlands especially among the poorer households; and loss of a member of a household increases the degree of poverty especially among the relatively poor with the greatest impacts being felt with loss of female members of households. The Zimbabwe Science News Volume 36 (1+ 2) 2002, pp. 4

A goal programming model for planning management of Miombo woodlands

This study used a Goal Programming approach to investigate the effects of changes in agricultural policies and labour supply due to deaths in farming households, on use of woodlands under two regimes; namely one where utilization of forest resources was restricted to within sustainable levels and under another where this restriction was relaxed, i.e. an open access situation. The study sites for this work were Mutangi in Chivi district and Mafungutsi in Gokwe districts. The results from the study indicate that households in communal areas are highly differentiated with regards to ability to satisfying family sustenance goals; relatively poor households depend on woodlands for a significant part of their income needs but richer families are more efficient in harvesting woodlands; increase in agricultural product prices or increase in crops yield tend to increase harvesting of woodland products among the better off and reduce woodland harvests by the poorer households; and loss of a member of a household increases the degree of poverty especially among the relatively poor with the greatest impacts being felt with loss of female members of households

The party-state in the land occupations of Zimbabwe: the case of Shamva district

There has been significant debate about the land occupations which occurred from the year 2000 in Zimbabwe, with a key controversy concerning the role of the state and ruling party (or party-state) in the occupations. This controversy, deriving from two grand narratives about the occupations, remains unresolved. A burgeoning literature exists on the Zimbabwean state’s fast-track land reform programme, which arose in the context of the occupations, but this literature is concerned mainly with post-occupation developments on fast-track farms. This article seeks to contribute to resolving the controversy surrounding the party-state and the land occupations by examining the occupations in the Shamva District of Mashonaland Central Province. The fieldwork for our Shamva study focused exclusively on the land occupations (and not on the fast-track farms) and was undertaken in May 2015. We conclude from our Shamva study that involvement by the party-state did not take on an institutionalised form but was of a personalised character entailing interventions by specific party and state actors