Reallocating unused farmland welcome policy

THE land reform programme in the early 2000s gave a lot of Zimbabweans the opportunity to become good farmers, especially when this was backed by the input schemes under the Second Republic, and now the redistributed land is producing more than it did under its previous owners.

But it would be producing quite a lot more if everyone who applied and who was granted a farm under land reform had used that farm instead of just keeping it for speculation or some sort of insurance against job loss or old age, but never intending to move into farming as a proper business.

Now the national audit is complete, and the Government knows how each of the farms, small and medium-sized, that were carved out of the land taken into State ownership is being used and whether it is being used at all.

Last week Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi made it clear when replying to questions in Parliament that withdrawal letters will be going out to those who were allocated land, but have not been using their farms, or not using them properly.

These will be cancelling the offer letters that allocated the farms in the first place.

We assume the Government will take into account all factors, including the obvious one that someone starting out in farming has to build up the business, using more land each year, and might still have some unused land at this stage, but with a decent slice already in production and plans for the rest.

But there are those, as Minister Ziyambi noted, who just wanted a rural homestead, and as was vividly described some years ago as a place for a weekend braai. One problem is that concept of “a piece of land” that one hears about quite often.

Many people like the idea of having “a piece of land”, sometimes because it is just nice to look at and sometimes because it could be future security.

Unfortunately for them, the Government has not been allocating “pieces of land”.

It has been allocating farms, and these are supposed to be used to grow crops and raise livestock, the precise proportions and the types of crop and livestock depending on many factors including the ecological zone, average rainfall, access to water and whether the land is arable or only suitable for ranching.

The Second Republic has, with its swathe of input schemes, gone some distance further wanting all farmland to be farmed profitably and all farmers, regardless of the size of their farm, to be running a business that makes money as well, in many cases, raising a large proportion of the food that the farmers and their families eat.

As Minister Ziyambi noted, farms are supposed to be farmed. The Government has opened doors for many special cases, allowing for example that those who find their allocation too large can lease a proportion of their farm out.

The farm remains in production under these schemes and they cope with changes, such as an elderly person who was allocated a farm in the prime of middle-age, but now cannot cope since they have no children, or at least no children interested in farming.

Many are more fortunate, having a grown-up child who wants to farm and quite probably knows a lot about farming, and we see on several farms a cottage where the “old folks” live, while their vigorous child runs the farm. This is natural and is common in all cultures.

In some cases the audit must have found that a particular farm has a lot of underused land because it was too large for the resources of the farmer who was allocated the holding.

The farmer is not lazing around and is in production, but just needs a smaller farm. Here the opportunity exists to cut the size of the farm and to reallocate the rest.

There is no need to withdraw the whole farm, just the land that is not being used and is unlikely to be used in the foreseeable future.

We need to remember that besides the imperative that farms should be in production, there are many more applicants for land than there is free land available.

Most districts and provinces have lengthening waiting lists, and so there are readily available citizens who want to farm who could take over unused land and convert it into productive farms.

Land reform was not meant to be a one-off. The Constitutional provisions and the detailed law make it clear that it is a continuous process, designed to give access to land to Zimbabweans who wish to farm and who wish to produce.

The large amount of land that came into State ownership was redivided into more than 254 000 farms of varying sizes, and this was from land that was held by little more than 4 000 original owners.

But the idea that such a huge productive base should be set in some sort of permanent stone is not viable and is not fair.

Those who were allocated farms and are using the farms obviously have a right to keep on using that allocation, and should have some sort of security although not permanent ownership.

But those not using their land should realise that right from the very beginning there was the policy of “use it or lose it” and there were reports of multiple allocations and other administrative problems that needed to be sorted out.

All this moved from theory to practical policies with the completion of the land audit under the Second Republic.

That Government needed to know how that huge block of State rural land was being used, and a major part of the audit has been to create the required database of those who were allocated the farms, and what they are doing with the land.

The new land information management system (LIMS) at long last makes it easy to see exactly what is happening on the ground, literally in this case, and allows accurate records to be kept up to date as allocations change, new farmers inherit farms or are allocated land and how production uses change and grow.

The data did exist, in millions of manual files. It is now converted to a proper modern database that can be used to identify and manage this large State estate, and make sure that the land is farmed so that Zimbabwe can continue to grow more food, more cash crops, raise more livestock and produce more milk.