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Get Statement Debating Zimbabwe’s Land Reform IAN SCOONES This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivs 3.0 Unported License. Correct citation: Scoones, I. (2014). Debating Zimbabwe’s Land Reform. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies Photo credits: Photography is by B.Z. Mavedzenge. Front cover: Ruchanyu garden. Back cover: Rwafa maize crop ISBN: 978-1-4936-8062-7 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword vii About the author x Acronyms xi Section A: Agricultural and livestock production 1 1 Small farms, big farms 4 2 The golden leaf: boom time in Zimbabwe 9 3 The sweet smell of success: the revival of Zimbabwe’s 12 sugar industry 4 Farming under contract 17 5 Zimbabwe’s beef industry 21 6 Zimbabwe’s poultry industry: rapid recovery, but major 24 challenges 7 Mechanising Zimbabwean agriculture 27 8 Appropriate technologies? 30 Section B: The economy 33 9 Resource nationalism’: a risk to economic recovery? 36 10 Growth in jeopardy? Re!ections on Zimbabwe’s 2013 39 budget statement 11 An unbalanced economy 41 12 The new farm workers: Changing agrarian labour 44 dynamics 13 Transforming Zimbabwe’s agrarian economy 48 14 Credit and "nance 53 15 The whites who stayed in agriculture 55 iv Section C: Political dimensions 58 16 Robert Mugabe… what happened? 61 17 Missing politics? 65 18 Class and rural di#erentiation after land reform 71 19 Know your constituency: a challenge for all of 73 Zimbabwe’s political parties 20 Transforming the state: building security from below 77 21 Why nations fail: perspectives on Zimbabwe 81 22 Geographies of violence in Zimbabwe 85 23 Lowveld politics 89 24 The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Re!ections on 92 white farming in Zimbabwe 25 A media glasnost? 95 Section D: Land 97 26 Who took the land? More on the ‘crony’ debate 100 27 Dead capital: De Soto’s fallacies in Zimbabwe 103 28 Accurate land "gures matter 106 29 Whose law counts? Legal contests over land in 108 Zimbabwe 30 Land and the Constitution 111 31 Zimbabwe has a new Constitution, but disputes over 113 the land provisions continue 32 A prescient perspective on land from 1968 117 Section E: Rural development issues 118 33 Twenty years of livelihood change in southern 121 Zimbabwe v 34 Challenges and problems of resettlement: over a 124 decade on 35 Beyond the farm: getting local economies moving 126 36 Creating communities 131 37 Young people and agriculture 133 38 Education on the farms 137 39 Fighting the !y: drivers of disease in the Zambezi valley 139 40 Migration myths 141 41 Nutrition Puzzles 144 42 Elephants and people 146 Section F: Aid and development 149 43 Aid to Zimbabwe: time for a rethink? 153 44 Sanctions stand-o# 155 45 The UK aid programme in Zimbabwe 157 46 Dealing with the national debt 160 47 Compensation for land 163 48 China and Brazil in Zimbabwe 166 Section G: Comparative lessons 169 49 Zimbabwe’s land myths exposed – implications for 172 South Africa? 50 Agrarian change, rural poverty and land reform: South 176 Africa’s experience 51 The case for redistributing land – evidence from South 179 Africa 52 Lessons from Thailand? A new rural economy and 181 Zimbabwe’s political peasants vi 53 BRICS in Africa: new imperialism or a new development 184 paradigm? 54 The next great trek: from Zimbabwe to Nigeria 187 Section H: Researching land and agrarian change 189 55 When is research ‘really authoritative’? 192 56 Who are the authors? The challenges of positionality, 196 partiality and re!exivity 57 Masvingo exceptionalism? The challenge of case 199 studies 58 Dodgy data and missing measures: why good numbers 203 matter 59 A growing evidence base: yet more inconvenient truths 210 Endpiece 214 60 Policies for land, agriculture and rural development 215 !"" FOREWORD This is a book of a blog. This may seem odd, given that all 60 of the chapters have appeared on the Zimbabweland blog1, and remain free to view in the archives. But I thought that it would be good to put a selection together in one place to save all that clicking. There are also eight new essays summarising the di#erent sections. The book is published in low cost format with no royalties accruing, allowing a small cover price for print-on-demand copies, as well as an electronic version. The book has been distributed widely in Zimbabwe, including in all our study sites in Masvingo. The blog has gathered quite a following: both those who appreciate it, and those who hate it. There are several thousand page views each month from all over the world, but particularly from Zimbabwe, South Africa, the UK and the US. It was set up soon after our 2010 book, Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and Realities, was published by James Currey, Weaver Press and Jacana Media. The book’s publication resulted in a massive amount of commentary that has persisted in various forms, some of which you can see in the media and review sections of our website at www.zimbabweland.net. The website also o#ers further resources, including photos, booklets, videos and more. The blog has served a number of purposes. It allows a weekly opportunity to comment, to let o# steam and express frustrations, irritations, sometimes anger, at the wider commentary on Zimbabwe, and the land question in particular. More positively, it also o#ers a chance to share with readers things I have found interesting, challenging and inspirational. Because, amongst the dross that is written about Zimbabwe, there are plenty of excellent contributions, most of which do not get any air time. The blog also allows us to keep the debate provoked by our book alive, to respond to the critiques, and to share new material in advance of formal publication. The Masvingo research project was established in 2000 in response to the land invasions, and subsequent Fast Track Land Reform Programme. As researchers who had worked in the province for many years, "nding out what happened after 1 www.zimbabweland.wordpress.com; see also www.zimbabweland.net viii DEBATING ZIMBABWE’S LAND REFORM land reform occurred was important. The research has been funded by grants from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and Department for International Development, and has been linked to work at PLAAS (the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa), the University of Zimbabwe and others over the years. The research in Masvingo has been led by B.Z. Mavedzenge, and has involved Felix Murimbarimba and Jacob Mahenehene in recent years (and also Nelson Marongwe and Chrispen Sukume previously). Thanks are especially due to the many people in the land reform settlements and beyond who have been involved in the research, as well as Agritex and others for engaging with the work. For the production of this book, thanks are due to to Jake Cornwall Scoones for his expert design and production skills, to Mar Maestre Morales for putting the blogs into the book format and to Ollie Burch for his continued administrative support. Now over 13 years, our research has documented what happened in Masvingo province across 16 sites, including A1 (small-scale), A2 (medium-scale commercial farms) and informal (not registered) sites, across a transect from the relatively higher potential areas to the north to the dryland areas in the lowveld, and including sites in the irrigated areas around Chiredzi. 400 households were included in our original sample and we have documented in detail what has happened using both quantitative and qualitative methods. In the light of extensive misperceptions and inaccuracies in media and academic commentary alike, our aim has been to shed light on the controversial issues, and "nd out what was actually happening on the ground. The empirical data published in our book challenged "ve oft-repeated myths, and provided an empirical base for subsequent explorations. We have continued work in Masvingo since the book’s publication, allowing us to explore the dynamics after 2009, and the stabilisation of the economy. Others have taken up the challenge to explore similar questions in di#erent areas, providing an increasingly comprehensive overview of the land reform aftermath. This sort of empirical data is essential if solid, informed debate about future directions is to take place. That our results have been used by some for political purposes is inevitable in the highly charged debate around Zimbabwe’s land, but in the blog and other writings we have tried to stay above the fray, and focus on FOREWORD ix the results on the ground. A particular e#ort has been invested in encouraging others to do more work – to challenge, question and deepen our "ndings. The small grants competition the Institue of Development Studies at Sussex (IDS), the African Institute for Agrarian Studies, Harare (AIAS), Ruzivo Trust, Harare and PLAAS developed for young Zimbabwean researchers was one example. In the blog, and in this book, some of the work of this next round of research is pro"led. I hope you enjoy the chapters in this book. Remember that they were written to a weekly deadline and usually respond to events and policy moments that now have been superseded. However, bearing this in mind, the contributions do show how the debate has moved on. Sometimes this has been painfully slow, held back by a lack of understanding, poor engagement with the empirical realities and a set of ideological biases that blinkers, closes down and constrains debate. But today there is much more empirical data, from a range of sources and places, and this has substantially enhanced our ability to debate the evidence and the policy implications more thoroughly.
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