Reply #12: To think that for over a decade, Zimbabwe had one of the world's most successful land reform program [View All]

From roughly 1980 through the mid 1990s, Zimbabwe had one of the world's most successful land reform programs. Commentators from across the spectrum analyzed it and held it up as a model for other countries -- from the South African Department of Land Affairs on the left, to the World Bank on the right, to the British overseas development council, everyone who analyzed it was impressed.

The program involved the compensated expropriation of land from the bloated, inefficient, "white" farm sector. These farmers had farms of anywhere between 2,000 to 15,000 acres. They rarely used most of that land, and often held the rest as game reserves, which they charged wealthy overseas adventurers large fees to shoot exotic animals. They also spent scarce foreign exchange on tractors, parts, fuel and other inputs.

In the tradition of southern African white farmers, they did not actually do physical labor, but hired African farm laborers to do the work -- farm laborers who had the skills to carry out farming on their own, if most of the Africans' best land had not been expropriated and turned over to whites from the early to mid 1900s.

According to the 1980 Lancaster House settlement of the Zimbabwean civil war, these farmers were targeted for expropriation and land reform, with the compensation to be paid in British pounds sterling or American dollars. Because of the scarcity of foreign exchange, the compensation was to be funded by the British and American governments.

The farms were distributed to tens of thousands of skilled African farmers, many of them resettled from Zimbabwe's impoverished, crowded black reservations, or "reserves" or "tribal areas." Each white farm could accommodate dozens or even hundreds of small scale black commercial farmers, who used less capital intensive and more labor intensive and animal intensive methods to grow much more food and goods per acre.

By the early 1990s, small scale black farmers were producing more food and agricultural goods than Zimbabwe's white farmers, on both an aggregate, value added, and per acre basis. Human development index studies of resettled black farmers showed that by almost every measure, resettled farmers had dramatically improved their standard of living, and in particular the well-being of women and children had increased.

It's too bad the British and Americans cut off funding for Zimbabwe's land reform program. In a fit of pique, the British and Americans ended the program over their concerns about corruption, the increasingly anti-Democratic drift of Mugabe's politics and the diversion of some of the expropriated farms to wealthy Mugabe supporters through corruption.

Without dollars and pounds sterling provided by the British and Americans, it became obviously impossible to continue the land reform program as envisioned in the Lancaster House agreement, which is to say, compensated in international currency.

The cut off of British and American funding for Zimbabwe's land reform program is the excuse Mugabe gave for then turning to unorganized, uncompensated and ultimately unsuccessful land reform through land seizure and his increasingly dictatorial and irrational stances.

Yesterday, however, the leading expert on Zimbabwe in the United States, Jeffrey Herbst, wrote an op-ed in the NY Times calling for a resumption of aid to Zimbabwe and the re-integration of Zimbabwe into the community of nations, because Mugabe has finally formed a coalition government with his long term opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change and has appointed Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister.