No return for white farmers

2005-07-31 21:13

Harare - Zimbabwe has ruled out any plans to lure back white commercial farmers whose land was seized during the country's land reforms that started in 2000.

"We are not inviting any white farmers back, never," said lands, land reform and resettlement minister Didymus Mutasa.

"The land here is for the black people and we are not giving it back to anybody. Why did we repossess that land in the first place," said Mutasa, who is also state security minister.

Mutasa's comments came in the wake of veiled overtures by central bank governor Gideon Gono in May to white farmers to help shore up the struggling agricultural industry.

Maximum

"In order to ensure maximum productivity levels, there is great scope in the country for promoting and supporting ventures between new farmers with progressive-minded former operators of horticultural estates ... so as to hasten skills transfer," Gono said in a monetary policy statement in May.

Zimbabwe has seized land owned by some 4 500 white farmers, forcibly taking away millions of hectares of land and giving it to landless blacks.

Only about 400 white farmers are still operating in the country, according to the country's white Commercial Farmers Union (CFU).

Mutasa's statement came just ahead of the CFU annual general meeting to take place in the capital on Tuesday.

Partly to blame

The land reform programme, which critics say is partly to blame for the drop in agricultural output in recent years, was ostensibly to correct land ownership imbalances created under British colonial rule, which ended in 1980.

Before the land seizures, some 70 percent of the most fertile land in Zimbabwe was owned by white farmers.

- AFP