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Zimbabwe admits land grabs failed
 As wealth redistro schemes usually do.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's regime has confessed that its seizure of white-owned farms has benefited fewer than 10 percent of the black Zimbabweans who were promised new futures as commercial landowners. A land ministry audit laid bare Mugabe's destruction of agriculture, the backbone of Zimbabwe's economy. The scheme has benefited only 4,867 people, while the official target was 50,000.| Leaving 45,133 of Bob's cronies and "war veterans" to seethe, and the rest of the population to starve. |
At least one third of the land given to "new farmers" is lying idle at a time when Zimbabwe is suffering food shortages so severe that some three million people need emergency help from the World Food Program. The audit found that nothing is happening on 11 percent, where "no agricultural activity" was recorded. Another 30 percent is classed as "underutilized." Before the onset of the land grab five years ago, about 300,000 black workers lived on white-owned farms. Most were forced to leave and reduced to destitution when their farms were seized. The audit has shown that very few people were resettled in their place. Even taking into account another scheme under which greater numbers of peasant farmers were given land, it seems certain that Mugabe's land grab has displaced more blacks than it has benefited. The relative handful of winners was disproportionately drawn from the regime's senior ranks, with cabinet ministers, generals and judges all helping themselves to land.
Posted by: Besoeker 2006-01-26 |
