By Basildon Peta
Only about half of the eight million hectares of land seized from Zimbabwe's white farmers has been occupied by new black owners, prompting fears of a drastic decline in agricultural output next year.
Most of the land seized from farmers under Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's controversial policies of confiscating white farms for resettling blacks is now lying fallow, much of it abandoned by new owners who were not given the resources to farm.
So bad is the situation that the government has threatened to re-confiscate land from the new black owners and transfer it to others. Reports said in some areas the government had already started reconfiscating the land.
Continues Below ↓
'People should be on their farms before the end of the rainy season' Mashonaland East province, which had some of the country's most productive farmland and biggest tobacco farms, was the worst affected. David Karimanzira, the province's governor and resident minister, admitted that only half of the seized land in the province had been occupied, close to a month after the expiry of the first deadline for the new black farmers to move there.
"We have given the new settlers a deadline of up to the end of this month, failing which the land will be given to other applicants," Kariomanzira told the state-owned Herald newspaper.
The deadline is the second issued to the new settlers in as many months.
"We want production on the farms and people should be on their farms before the end of the rainy season," said Karimanzira.
In Matabeleland North Province, authorities had already started reconfiscating land. Obert Mpofu, the province's governor, was also quoted recently by the Herald as saying his officials had already started re-possessing "plots which have not been taken up by the beneficiaries and allocating them to applicants who have been on the waiting list".
'This is not a land reform programme'
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
