D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 2, March/April 2002, p. 19 - 20)

President Robert Mugabe is the personality and Zimbabwe the country, that readily comes to mind once mention is made today of land reform in Africa. High on the media throughout the world is the ruthless way in which white farmers are driven off their land with the open approval of the government. But the brutality used against Zimbabwe's large commercial farmers often obscures the gravity of the problem of land ownership, not only for Zimbabwe's majority population, but also for the rest of the continent. The land issue must be addressed if Africa's alarming poverty is to be reduced.

In a continent which is home to 33 of the world’s 48 least developed countries, meeting the United Nations target of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015 will depend largely on how much access ordinary people have to the means of production. For the world’s poor, land is the principal means of production they can afford. It is this resource, which is so central to the daily survival of an overwhelming majority of Africa’s 850 million people that is at the centre of a controversial government programme in the Southern African nation, Zimbabwe. A country of 13 million inhabitants, Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980 after a protracted liberation struggle. Like many Southern African countries, Zimbabwe has both black and white citizens. Most of the white Zimbabweans or British nationals, who decided to remain in the country after independence, are large scale farmers; cultivating tobacco or involved in ranching. Today some 5000 mainly white commercial farmers own 45 per cent of the country’s land. South Africa’s fabulously wealthy Oppenheimer dynasty, for instance, has holdings in Zimbabwe alone, estimated at some 960,000 hectares (2.4 million acres), equal to a third of the size of Belgium. At the other extreme are about 70 per cent of black Zimbabweans, who have no land at all.

President Robert Mugabe’s government has chosen to seize white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to landless blacks. But the "crusade" as he has repeatedly called it, not a land reform programme, lacks any elements of a national programme. Led by the ruling ZANU-PF party, championed by Mugabe, executed by thousands of party militants calling themselves war veterans and carefully overseen by the police force, the land seizures have brought anarchy to the country. According to the president of the Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe, Colin Cloete, 6 white farmers and 40 black farm labourers, have been killed in the violent attacks as hundreds of invaders descend on white farms and property throughout the country. A High Court ruling in the middle of last year, declaring the farm invasions unconstitutional, did not succeed in stopping the campaign of terror. Colin Cloete says the damage to property alone, is "running into billions of Zimbabwean dollars". The agriculture-dependent Zimbabwean economy, has lost far more in terms of foreign exchange earnings as a consequence of the disruption of farm activities.

Regrettably enough, only few of the landless people have been resettled at the end of the day. A crippled economy, a state of perpetual lawlessness and a nation increasingly isolated by the rest of the world, is all the government has to show for its policies. Mugabe’s attempt at exploiting the country’s skewed land distribution problem for his personal political ends has almost transformed a genuine national issue into a bitter political controversy. One thing he has not succeeded in doing, though, is diminishing the urgency for a solution to the problem in the eyes of other political leaders. Even people as fiercely opposed to President Mugabe’s land reform programme as the leader of the country’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangarai, insists: "My quarrel is with the manner not the principle. If we come to power we will carry out a land reform programme that is healthy for all our citizens and our economy."

In neighbouring Namibia and South Africa land ownership patterns are all too similar to the Zimbabwe case but the land reform programmes are a stark contrast. South Africa is dealing with the most deeply entrenched white-dominated colonial legacy of any of these three countries. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) says smallholders in South Africa control less than 13 per cent of the agricultural land while 86 per cent belongs to some 60,000 commercial farmers. Various parties put the percentage of Namibia’s total land area of 824,269 square kilometres held by the country’s 5000 commercial farmers, at between 67 and 80 per cent. In both countries, the governments have ruled out seizures as a part of their land reform strategy. Instead, they have adopted the market-oriented "willing-seller willing-buyer" concept which is favoured and prompted by financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is even inscribed in the constitutions of the two countries as the only legal manner through which land can be acquired. The Namibian Land Acquisition Fund, has so far resettled 40,000 people on farms bought by the government since independence in 1990.

The "willing-seller willing-buyer" approach, has procured for these countries a stable and lawful environment which is a prerequiste for any meaningful development. But that market-oriented path is littered with real hurdles such as the inability of millions of poor peasants to pay for land at today’s exorbitant market prices. The coffers of government-created land acquisition funds have dried up without even a dent being made on the imbalance of land ownership.

Critics in both countries describe the balance sheet of this approach as dismal. Agricultural reporter and writer, John Madeley, warns that "where you have some people feeling aggrieved because they don’t have land, there is more likely to be political unrest". That potential for anarchy and violence is greater in communities where such unfair land ownership patterns are slanted along a race or ethnic divide. The first signs that impatience is already giving way to anger are now being seen in both countries. South Africa’s opposition Pan Africanist Congress party (PAC) has recently been giving overt support to a wave of state land invasions by squatters. Its member of parliament, Patricia de Lille, calls the situation of landless Black South Africans "a shame and a betrayal". Add to this leaders like the Namibian parliamentary opposition leader, Katuutire Kaura, who oppose market-driven land reform on purely moral grounds. Perceived, essentially, as a colonial legacy, he argues strongly, "it is morally wrong to ask us to pay for land that was seized from us".

Beyond the South

Land reform is becoming an increasingly important rallying issue for many communities outside Southern Africa. In the northern half of the continent, for example, many countries are dealing with harsh climatic conditions because of the Sahara desert. The Arab Organisation for Agricultural Development singles out Algeria and Morocco, as having acute land ownership problems. In 1982, it put the total number of landless people in the two countries at 165,000 and 1,082,000 respectively. Egypt, another country within the subregion, has taken recourse to the constitution in its search for a tenable solution to its own land distribution problem. Law 96/1992 puts a maximum ownership of land per person at 42 hectares, imposing heavy taxes to deter people from using the exception clause in that law. According to the Arab Organisation for Agricultural Development, only 2000 people fell into that category in 1992 and accounted for 8.5 per cent of the country’s agricultural land. In the slums of the Kenyan capital city Nairobi, activist and opposition parliamentarian, Stephen Ndichu, is rallying landless peasants against those now commonly known as the "land grabbers"; the handful of politically influential individuals who have amassed huge expanses of land that they cannot even put to use.

West and Central Africa are also confronted with a land ownership problem which, however, is far less acute than in the southern part of the continent and manifests itself in completely different ways. Landless people are a rare exception in the sub-region. In Cameroon and Ghana for instance, IFAD statistics show that the top 20 per cent of agricultural households own 50.5 and 58.0 per cent of the agricultural land compared to 3.6 and 7.8 per cent for the bottom 20 per cent. In spite of this relatively positive picture, observers of land ownership and distribution patterns are pointing at two fundamental flaws. The first element is the quality of land. Here, peasant farmers who were pushed off the fertile plains they once occupied in the 1960s and 70s to make way for various government and multinational cash crop plantations, are today cramped on marginal lands, often on hilly and rocky slopes. Environmentalists are now drawing attention to the negative ecological impact of this land use pattern. For instance, according to environment expert Benjamin Serkfem, the devastating floods in Cameroon’s coastal city of Limbe in September 2001 were due to extensive farming on the hills surrounding the city striping them of their former lush forest cover.

A second flaw in land distribution patterns is attributed to the widespread customary land ownership and inheritance practices common throughout most of West and Central Africa, especially when viewed from a gender perspective. In most communities, land is owned almost exclusively by men, and women are barred from inheriting land, even from their own husbands or parents. Paradoxically enough, almost all of the small holdings which meet the food needs of most communities in the region, are cultivated by women. So deep rooted is the impact of tradition, not only in this corner of Africa, but in many developing countries, that in its Rural Poverty Report 2001, IFAD concedes that "the strength of custom and of men’s power make it difficult to identify practical changes to land systems that will improve women’s land rights".

An imperative for survival

The examples of the serious nature of the land ownership imbalances across Africa today are numerous. The effects of the the problem manifest themselves on the economy, the environment as well as in the political and socio-cultural arena. This realisation is giving rise to a discourse about the need for a new agriculture. In John Madeley’s most recent book entitled ‘Food for All. The need for a new agriculture’ he looks critically at some of the agricultural development paradigms that have guided development initiatives within the last four decades. The principle of economies of scale, which prompted the rush in creating huge plantations in the 1960s and 70s, is one of them. Many argue today, that the World Bank/IMF export-oriented plantation agriculture, which was embraced by most African economies, has neither doubled their foreign exchange earnings as was promised nor has it met the food needs of the population. Instead of the huge employment avenues to be created by the big agro complexes predicted by the financial institutions, many of these economies have witnessed the number of hands on farms dwindle.

The new agriculture which is still in its early stages of definition tends to advocate a land reform programme which privileges small holdings. Proponents argue that smaller farm units increase productivity, employ more people and generate more income". Following studies conducted in Asia, Latin America as well as parts of Southern Africa, IFAD concludes that allowing for land quality, productivity of smaller farmers is usually at least twice that of the larger ones.

For that new agriculture to deliver results as far as poverty eradication is concerned in Africa, the land reform that is being promoted must go beyond land itself. Other aspects including access to farm capital, such as tools and seeds should be addressed and other key players, especially women and civil society should be brought in. Environmentalists, economists, development workers and civil society are taking a growing interest in the land reform debate, as they realise the extent to which their effectiveness on the ground will be determined by the direction that reform finally takes.