Harare - Fresh farm invasions once again erupted in Zimbabwe this week as about 600 illegal settlers occupied sugar estates belonging to Tongaat Hulett’s units in the country.
Tongaat Hulett controls just over 50 percent in Zimbabwe Stock Exchange-listed Hippo Valley and has a majority interest in Triangle Sugar. The two units supply sugar to the Zimbabwean and export markets, largely in the EU.
However, the security of land ownership in Zimbabwe was thrown into fresh uncertainty this week after the illegal occupations of estates owned by Hippo Valley and Triangle. In the past two years, government officials have threatened to cancel the company’s land leases for alleged complacence in complying with a contentious black economic empowerment policy.
Early this week a mob of about 600 people, who said they had land offer letters from the government, invaded estates belonging to the Tongaat Hulett units. However, information at hand shows that the offer letters were for land yet to be developed for resettlement and not that belonging to the two sugar producers.
Although officials at Hippo Valley played down the impact of the fresh farm invasions, experts said the development occasioned a fresh wave of uncertainty in the agricultural sector. A government official told Business Report on Tuesday that all land in Zimbabwe belonged to the state and that the government had constitutional rights to take over land for resettlement purposes.
Adelaide Chikunguru, the communications manager at Hippo Valley, said the issue was “being dealt with appropriately” by government officials while there had been no significant disturbance to the company’s productivity as “operations are continuing as normal”.
There was no immediate response to questions e-mailed to Tongaat Hulett’s communications manager, Michelle Jean-Louis, although Peter Staude, the chief executive, has previously said that the company planned “to stay in the country for a long time” despite concerns over the security of its property rights.
In an e-mailed response yesterday, Tongaat Hulett said: “We are scheduled to release our results for the year to March 31 next week. As is normally the case, we will provide commentary with those results.”
Experts said the new invasions would dim the slightest prospects Zimbabwe had of attracting investments at a time when the economy is struggling to shrug off its risk factor. The World Bank has revised Zimbabwe’s growth outlook for this year to 3.1 percent.
The government has officially informed Zimplats, the Zimbabwe unit of Impala Platinum, of its intention to take over 27 000 hectares of land constituting nearly half of the platinum claims the platinum major owns in the country.
Zimplats has appealed but the government has not backed off and indications are that the appeal will be turned down.
Charles Taffs, the president of the Commercial Farmers Union, said: “There seems to be a hardened level of insecurity in the commercial farming sector. We are appealing to government to please put an end to this because if this continues, there is no funding coming.”
He added that there was a need to uphold property rights as “no one is going to put their money into an investment portfolio that is going to be taken”.
Zimbabwe is in desperate need of foreign direct investment, considered crucial to put the economy back on its feet.
Government officials said they had ordered law enforcers to remove the settlers from the estates. Reports said yesterday that more than 100 people had been arrested for the action.
“We will never allow people without offer letters to occupy land anywhere and those who have occupied cane estates in Chiredzi should go out immediately,” Lands and Resettlement Minister Douglas Mombeshora said. “We do not condone lawlessness and the police will deal with them.”
Hippo Valley is forging ahead with an ambitious pri-vate farmer sugar cane rehab-ilitation programme aimed at boosting its capacity. Under this programme, about 2 340 hectares were planted during the year to March last year.
Hippo Valley forecasts that it will produce about 222 000 tons of Zimbabwe’s 460 000 ton projected sugar output this year.