Cape Town - Forests engulf fields that used to produce
some of the world’s best tobacco around the northern Zimbabwean town of Banket,
while barns that once stored the leaf stand empty, their corrugated iron
roofs ripped off and sold for scrap. Most of the farm workers have left.
“We are 15 here now, from roughly 50,” said
25-year-old Bruce Mahenya, who lives in a mud-and-grass hut behind a defunct
trading store on a farm about 95 kilometers northwest of the capital, Harare.
“My mother, father and brother have gone. I said I would remain alone in case
things get better, but it’s hard.”
It’s a familiar story across vast tracts of Zimbabwe,
where President Robert Mugabe’s goal of transforming the countryside through
the seizure of about 4 500 white-owned commercial farms remains illusive. Some
of the best acreage fell into ruin because senior ruling party officials who
took it over had no farming expertise. Other farms also failed because they
were given to small producers with no money to pay for fertilizer and equipment.
In recent years, the crisis has been compounded by drought followed by
torrential rains.
Many of those who have abandoned their farms joined an
exodus of an estimated 3 million Zimbabweans to South Africa and other
countries or moved to overcrowded urban townships. As many as 4 million
Zimbabweans, about a quarter of the population, need food aid, according to the
government.
“We thought when we were placed there that we’d be
helped, but no, we were just left,” said Alec Kaitano, a 23-year-old who
abandoned his smallholding outside the northeastern town of Bindura a year ago
and survives by selling blemished fruit he finds in garbage cans in Harare.
“Those white farmers we displaced had money to farm, but we didn’t so we
failed.”
Data
United Nations data shows the proportion of the
population living in towns surged to about 32 percent in 2015, from 11 percent
in 1950, a trend that’s broadly in line with other African countries. While
more recent data isn’t readily available, observations of the countryside and
anecdotal evidence suggest migration is accelerating.
Mugabe, who’s ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980,
says the land redistribution program that intensified around 2000 with the
expropriations is a success because it addressed the injustices of colonial and
white-minority rule.
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“Most of the land which used to be in the hands of the
settlers is now in the hands of our own people,” Mugabe told the state-owned
Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation in an interview screened on February 21 to mark
his 93rd birthday. “What there is now for us is to ensure there won’t be any
retrogression, that those who have been given the land will keep it, will use
it, cultivate it properly and ensure it is made productive.”
Bad weather
The government is aware some land is standing idle and
will take action once it completes an audit to determine the scope of the
problem, Lands and Resettlement Minister Douglas Mombeshora said in an
interview.
Some small-scale tobacco growers who’ve benefited
from technical assistance and support from companies including British
American Tobacco are faring better than their more numerous counterparts who
grow corn. Tobacco output has recovered from its lowest levels in 40 years in
the mid-2000s and may reach near-record sales this year.
Read also: Zimbabwe drought pushes farmers to greener pastures
The government can do nothing about the weather. The
region’s worst drought in at least two decades wiped out much of the corn crop
last year, while this year’s harvests are at risk from unseasonably heavy rain
that’s left fields waterlogged and rendered many rural roads unusable. Farms
have also been hit by an infestation of fall armyworms, a
caterpillar native to the Americas that eats crops including corn, the
staple food.
Elliot Gumbo, who grows corn and tobacco on a
smallholding near the northern town of Karoi, is among the dwindling number of
small-scale farmers who continue to tough it out, but says he doesn’t know how
long he’ll last.
“Last year we had a drought and this year the tobacco is
turning yellow because we’ve had too much rain,” he said. “There’s no help from
government because they’re also broke. I get help from my brother in Britain
who sends me money. If it wasn’t for him, I would have to probably try to find
work in town or leave.”