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Seized Zim farms 'lying idle'
17/01/2003 13:58 - (SA)
Harare - Less than half the land the Zimbabwe government has seized from white farmers to redistribute to landless blacks has been taken up by its new owners in at least one prime farming region, said reports on Friday.
The privately owned Daily Mirror newspaper said: "Vast tracts of land acquired by the government for the fast-track resettlement programme and allocated to new farmers under the commercial farming model ... in Mashonaland West are lying idle."
Beneficiaries of the land-reform programme were given until August last year to take up their land, but a commercial farming scheme in the province had a low uptake rate of between 35% and 50% of allocated land.
But, all the land allocated to small-scale communal farmers under the programme has been taken up, the paper said.
The government has threatened to repossess all unoccupied land allocated to black farmers under the commercial farm resettlement scheme.
Some land requires 'lots of work'
The government-run Herald newspaper cited lands minister Joseph Made as saying the state would repossess all land not taken up, and would use it for food production.
Two-thirds of Zimbabwe's population is threatened by famine.
The main reason given for prospective farmers failing to take up their land was that most of it was undeveloped and required lots of work.
"Some were expecting to be given plots on good soils, others didn't want to clear the land and expected already cleared ones," said Mashonaland West provincial governor Peter Chanetsa in a report to a parliamentary committee probing the land uptake throughout the country.
To date, the government claims to have re-settled 374 000 small-scale black farmers on 14 million hectares of formerly white-owned land.
Aid agencies say land reform is partly responsible for the hunger threatening close to eight million Zimbabweans, along with a drought that has hit five other southern African countries. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA
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