Zimbabwe’s land reform has had
a bad press. Images of chaos,
destruction and violence have
dominated the coverage.
Indeed, these have been part of
the reality - but there have also
been successes, which have thus
far gone largely unrecorded. The
story is not simply one of
collapse and catastrophe. It is
much more nuanced and
complex. As Zimbabwe moves
forward with a new agrarian
structure, a more balanced
appraisal is needed. This
requires solid, on-the-ground
research aimed at finding out
what happened to whom and
where with what consequences.
This was the aim of work carried
out in Masvingo province over
the past decade and reported in
the book, Zimbabwe’s Land
Reform: Myths and Realities. This
booklet offers an overview of the
findings. The question posed in
the research was simple: what
happened to people’s livelihoods
once they got land through the
‘fast-track’ programme from
2000? Yet the answers are
extremely complex.
The research involved in-depth
field research in 16 land reform
sites across the province,
involving a sample population of
400 households. The study area
stretched from the higher
potential areas near Gutu to the
dry south in the lowveld. What
we found was not what we
expected. It contradicted the
overwhelmingly negative images
of land reform presented in the
media, and indeed in much
academic and policy
commentary. Problems, failures
and abuses were identified for
sure, but the overarching story
was much more positive: the
realities on the ground did not
match the myths so often
perpetuated in wider debate.
Most coverage of Zimbabwe’s
land reform insists that
agricultural production has
almost totally collapsed, that
food insecurity is rife, that rural
economies are in precipitous
decline and that farm labour has
all been displaced. The truth
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however is much more complex.
We need to ask far more
sophisticated questions: Which
aspects of agricultural
production have suffered? Who is
food insecure? How are rural
economies restructuring to the
new agrarian setting? And who
are the new farm labourers?
These are the sort of questions
we have been asking over the
past decade in the research
carried out in Masvingo province.
Of course Masvingo is different
to the Highveld, where highly
capitalised agriculture reliant on
export markets did indeed
collapse and where labour was
displaced in large numbers. But
the picture in the new farms of
Masvingo is not unrepresentative
of broad swathes of the rest of
the country. And here the picture
is not so catastrophic. There is
much to do, of course, but there
is already much that is being
done.