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Zimbabwe has covered a lot of ground in correcting the skewed land ownership whereby the minority whites owned vast tracts of arable land while most blacks were confined to barren land. Since government embarked on the fast track land reform in 2000, more than 300,000 families are now proud owners of land in prime farming areas which used to be a preserve of the whites.
Some families were settled under the A1 model while others were settled under A2. The government is carrying out a land audit to find out how land is being used by the new farmers. It is a fact that there are multiple farm owners yet the government policy is one-man- one farm.
It is therefore our fervent hope that after the land audit, government will repossess the extra farms and allocate them to the thousands of landless Zimbabweans on its waiting list. The decision by the government to charge rentals to new farmers is a welcome development. The government is expecting to raise $22 million per annum from land rentals.
Lands and Rural Resettlement Minister Douglas Mombeshora said his ministry had started collecting rentals. He said all new farmers were expected to comply with the government directive for them to pay rentals. Minister Mombeshora said government will use part of the money collected to compensate white farmers while the remainder will be used to fund other government programmes.
Rentals will hit hard multiple farm owners who will be forced to surrender the extra farms back to government. Individuals who also got land for speculative purposes will also be forced to surrender back the land as they will not be able to pay the rentals. The government on its part should put in place mechanisms to ensure that each and every farmer allocated land pays the rentals and those who fail should be removed from the land.
The A1 farmers pay $2 per hectare per year while A2 farmers pay $3 and $2 unit tax. Farmers that use land productively will be able to pay the rentals given the fact that these are annual rentals which they pay after harvesting and selling their crops. There are many individuals whose land has been lying idle since 2000 and these will be hit hard by rentals.
Land is a finite resource which should be shared among Zimbabweans hence the call for multiple farm owners to surrender extra farms back to government. There are also individuals whose farms are very big and as such many of them are just using a fraction of their farms.
These too should surrender back the extra land so that it can be allocated to the landless. New farmers have an obligation to produce not just enough for the country’s consumption but surplus for export.
Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of Southern Africa and there is no excuse for failing to regain this status given that most of the farmers that have been allocated land in prime farming areas used to produce the bulk of the country’s food requirements from poor soils in the communal areas.
We want to once again implore government to intensify the collection of rentals to force those with extra land to surrender back the land to government so that other landless Zimbabweans can also benefit from the land reform programme.
Online Reporter