Many farm workers who are not Zimbabweans by descent (even though they may have or be entitled to acquire citizenship) have no access to the structures that allocate plots in the communal areas. Farm workers are thus among those with the greatest need for land. Surveys suggest that most farm workers would choose to stay on the farm where they are employed, with a plot of land to which they have title, even if they also continued to work in the commercial farming sector.156 In 1999, the government land policy framework for the first time acknowledged the need for farm workers to be resettled as well as those from communal areas, and recognized that those who entered the country as indentured labor from 1953 to 1963, and their children, are entitled to citizenship. 157 But farm workers have not been among the groups targeted to benefit from the fast track program. As of October 2001, official government statistics indicated that only 2,122 of the 123,979 households recorded as resettle d (that is, 1.7 percent) were farm worker households.158 GAPWUZ, the General, Agricultural and Plantation Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe, which claims 100,000 members, in a paper presented to a September 2001 conference, characterized the fast track land reform program as “the biggest challenge currently facing farm workers in Zimbabwe…. There are approximately 2 million people that can be labeled under the farm working community, and it is frightening to note that the land reform programme is silent as to the fate of the same.”159 GAPWUZ has made various recommendations to ensure that farm workers would be protected during the fast track process, including setting aside at least 20 percent of the land acquired for farm workers (along the lines of the same quota allocated for war veterans). Although farm workers are not precluded from applying for land under the fast track process, the problem for those who cannot prove their citizenship is that the process of registering for land formally involves registration with the council of the communal area from which they come, with no additional mechanisms put in place to enable them to access the new allocations easily. 160 Moreover, those farm workers who are not of Zimbabwean descent have additional problems, since if they are displaced from the farm they have no other place to go. Zimbabweans, on the other hand, usually have the possibility of returning to their family’s land in a communal area. As one farm worker commented: I was beaten during by-elections around November last year. All of us including the farmer were supporting MDC, because we have nowhere to go. I am an alien. My father came from Malawi. We are seven born here and we have nowhere to go. Our last-born is eighteen years old. My father is here. He is a pensioner.161 Another farm worker complained at the policy of favoring war veterans: I don’t agree that the war veterans should have the land. Land might be taken and given to some one else, but if they just give land to me or other people who are not trained as farmers then we are killing the whole nation. I would be happy to have land because most of the people on the farms have no homes; every person on the farms if given a piece of land we will just say thank you. They go to meetings where they discuss land but we are forced to go and attend. But I don’t know how that land is allocated. They are just taking it for themselves, not offering it to the farm 156 Baseline Survey of Commercial Farm Workers’ Characteristics and Living Conditions in Zimbabwe (Harare: Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe (FCTZ), April 2000). 157 Amanor-Wilks, Zimbabwe’s Farm Workers. 158 UNDP Interim Mission Report, January 2002, p.36. 159 GAPWUZ, “Zimbabwe,” in Southern Africa Regional Conference on Farm Workers’ Human Rights and Security, Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe, September 2001. 160 Human Rights Watch interview, Dr. Vincent Hungwe, Principal Director of Land and Rural Resettlement, Harare, July 30, 2001. 161 Human Rights Watch interview, farm worker, Beatrice District, Marondera West, July 26, 2001. Human Rights Watch 34 March 2002, Vol. 14, No. 1 (A)