On misty hills weeds smother surviving trees in the lost plantations of Zimbabwe’s eastern province, Manicaland.

With present international record prices for coffee and nuts, these trees should, in 2011, be worth their weight in gold.

But nowhere in the aftermath of President Robert Mugabe’s land reform is the devastation more absolute than around Chipinge.

The trees are dying or have already been stumped out. Replanting would take enormous capital and about 12 years before the first harvest.

Since land seizures began 11 years ago, agricultural exports – mainly tobacco – almost disappeared but slowly there has been some recovery and there are now 47 000 small- scale tobacco farmers, some of them doing well.

But tobacco, like maize, cotton and soyas, is an annual crop and international companies, often hiring evicted white farmers, are funding and teaching these new farmers to produce tobacco on disputed land.

Very few short-term crops do well in hillier parts of Manicaland where most of Zimbabwe’s plantations used to thrive.

“Manicaland has fragile steep soils, it is primarily suited to plantations, and regrettably over the last 11 years the critical mass of plantations have been decimated through abuse and it would be very difficult to get Manicaland back to where it was. There is no confidence to invest in long-term development,” says Trevor Gifford, 43, immediate past president of the Commercial Farmers’ Union, who was kicked off his farm, Wolverhampton, a year ago.

Zimbabwe was a serious coffee producer before land invasions, but production has slumped by 90 percent, with only five surviving commercial producers from before land invasions.

There are many black small-scale coffee growers who want to expand, and who could take advantage of assistance from the European Union which has long been involved with coffee in Zimbabwe, but these growers can’t export any longer without bulk production from large growers.

Gifford has long taken an interest, as a volunteer, in small scale growers and always goes to their field days in other mountainous parts of eastern Zimbabwe.

“The small-scale coffee farmer who has been growing since 1984, well, he or she knows that without the critical mass from commercial producers they are nothing because they will never produce an 18-ton container of same style coffee.”

Gifford says the Zanu-PF agriculture ministry discourages him and the EU from assisting new small-scale farmers to begin growing coffee as it would mean recognition that commercial growers, mainly white, were essential to the small grower.

Gifford, one of the younger evicted farmers, who is penniless now, but who would have had an income of more than $2 million a year if he was still on his farm, says Manicaland’s plantations are not being rebuilt, and are still being destroyed.

“I have seen in my travels, citrus industry, zero rebuilding, just destruction, macadamias zero building, just destruction. If you go and talk to the big timber guys, the losses that they have incurred from the fires in the past four or five years mean Zimbabwe we will be importing timber n the next couple of years.”

Zimbabwe’s commercial plantation farmers had world-class reputations for capital intensive, eco-friendly plantation farming. Gifford says he wants to remain in his country, and that he and several of his colleagues would like to help rebuild the plantations.

“We have such human capital if they just embraced us we could turn the plantations around.

“I could never go back to my farm, I couldn’t raise the money to fix it and live meanwhile, and I don’t want to own another bit of Africa.

“I don’t want to put good money after bad, but I have skills and expertise,” he says.

Gifford’s farm looks a mess from the road. The old security gate has a Zanu-PF slogan on it: “Our land, our sovereignty.”

Gifford, meanwhile, has not been paid any compensation, as is prescribed in the Land Acquisition Act, either for his land, or the massive improvements, such as the plantations. – Peta Thornycroft