The devastating famine in southern Africa highlights the region's contentious land question, reports Gamal Nkrumah The threat of famine on a large-scale engulfing southern Africa is polarising the debate on the root causes of a scarcity of food in the region. Nowhere is this more so than in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's government has earmarked many of the country's vast, white- owned commercial (as opposed to subsistence) farms for takeover by landless indigenous African peasants. Mugabe and his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) Party argue that it is morally untenable that, more than two decades after Zimbabwe won its independence from Britain in 1980, 70 per cent of the country's most fertile arable land still remains in the hands of 4,000 white settlers. The Oppenheimer family alone owns farms in Zimbabwe which collectively equal Belgium in size. In addition, huge swathes of land, according to the ZANU-PF, belong to absentee landlords. More than 10 million hectares of arable land have been seized by the Zimbabwean government in the past couple of years and allocated to landless people. Some 54,000 families have qualified and an estimated 12,000 families have already moved into the formerly white-owned land apportioned to them. The Zimbabwean government aims to supply every successful applicant with a plot of land before the dry season ends in August. Western nations and Zimbabwean opposition groups, led by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), retort that it was precisely the haphazard nature of the land-grab and the political mayhem, violence, mismanagement and corruption that ensued that led to the onset of the famine and Zimbabwe's economic ruin. "We're not God, we're not nature," Kufa Chinoza, minister-counselor at the Embassy of Zimbabwe in Cairo told Al-Ahram Weekly. "There was no land grab in either Malawi or Zambia, yet their people suffer the consequences of the drought and famine threatens their neighbours as well," he added. Four million people face starvation in Zambia, where maize production fell by 30 per cent in 2000-2001. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Malawi, last year's grain surplus was sold off and relief workers say the small landlocked country now needs $21 million in food aid to avert disaster. In Angola, where five people die every day in the demobilisation camps of the National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA) -- the formerly anti-government armed opposition group -- because of malnutrition, the civil war has rendered farming impossible in many parts of the country. The situation is equally grim in Mozambique, Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho. The Famine Early Warning System Network signals that the southern African region is in dire need of four million tonnes of maize to avoid the onset of widespread starvation. An estimated 1.5 million tonnes of maize is urgently needed by 15 million people in southern Africa. Not only is it the region's worst drought in 10 years, it also comes at a time of unsettling political, economic and social turmoil. The situation is made worse by the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the region -- the hardest-hit in Africa. The ravages of HIV/AIDS have ripped society's social fabric apart and decimated the population, negatively impacting on the output of farms and often leaving children whose parents died or were incapacitated to head several households. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) organised a two-day conference in Durban, South Africa, to discuss ways of averting a humanitarian disaster of catastrophic proportions in southern Africa, a disaster that would be reminiscent of the devastating famine that afflicted Ethiopia in the mid-1980s. The World Economic Forum Summit on Africa was held on 5-7 June, barely a week before the United Nations-organised conference on food in Rome. The two-day gathering of southern African government officials, international bankers and development experts in Durban, sought to work out and coordinate a humanitarian response between the different UN bodies, aid agencies and governments. Some 100 delegates examined recent food and crop assessments by the UN in the wake of a persistent dry spell that has blighted the southern African region. The main emphasis of the meeting was on attracting foreign investment and soliciting emergency aid through the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) that has been championed by the South African government and flaunted as the panacea for all the continent's ills. In Rome, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe defended his government's land policy, saying: "We have responded to the people's cry for land." He also said that, "There is now a brighter future for our farming community across colour, gender and ethnic divide." The contentious land question in Zimbabwe threatens to spill over into neighbouring southern African countries as unemployment and underdevelopment continue to stalk the land. Zimbabwean government officials remain adamant that the policy of land-seizure has paid off. "The bulk of the food is now produced by the indigenous population and what is more, locals are now growing and marketing cash crops like tobacco that were previously monopolised by white commercial farms," Chinoza says. The Zimbabwean government introduced a price incentive that covers 80 per cent of production costs for those farmers willing to switch to tobacco production. Indigenous African peasants, including those recently resettled on formerly white-owned farms, have been quick to take advantage of the measure. The landless peasants of yesterday now earn cash from selling the tobacco they farm. Zimbabwe, the world's third largest tobacco exporter, is set to increase production in spite of the severe drought that has ravaged the land. Tobacco, which needs far less water than other cash crops, has earned the country $6 million in hard currency so far this year. A survey, conducted jointly by Zimbabwe's Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare and the International Organisation for Migration, revealed that a majority of farm workers in Zimbabwe prefer to be resettled within the framework of the Zimbabwean government land reform programme. The choice of resettlement was highest in fertile regions of the country, such as Mashonaland, as opposed to regions with low and irregular rainfall where ranching is more prevalent, such as Matabeleland. Zimbabwean government officials say that they are speeding up bureaucratic procedures in order to facilitate a smooth handover. For example, they are carrying out, in white farms that the government seized, the demarcation of plots that will be handed over to indigenous peasants. However, delivering food to people in remote areas with little or no infrastructure is proving difficult in countries such as Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. The forces of globalisation have also come into play. Not only are the terms of trade weighted against producers of primary agricultural products and raw materials in Africa but African countries are obliged to take into account the trade wars being waged between industrially advanced nations. Zimbabwe's maize deficit is 1.5 million tonnes but the Zimbabwean government recently rejected a United States maize donation on the grounds that the grain was genetically modified and would ruin Zimbabwe's chances of exporting maize to Europe in years to come. Zimbabwe, which appealed to the UN for humanitarian assistance last October, is currently channelling $20 billion for food relief. However, opposition MDC Secretary General Welshman Ncube -- himself a beneficiary of the Zimbabwean government's land resettlement programme -- lashed out against Mugabe and his ministers for creating the problem of famine in Zimbabwe in the first place. Several development experts concur, arguing that the splitting-up of large, white- owned farms into smaller units is only complicating matters. According to Dr Sam Page, an agricultural expert in farmer participatory development who has worked in Zimbabwe for over 15 years, the Zimbabwean government's land-seizure policy worsened the impact of the drought, "because the land has been taken over by the government so it is in effect becoming one big communal area". She adds that red tape and bureaucratic procedures further aggravate the situation. "Without title deeds the new farmers cannot get loans to buy inputs and equipment so they are just subsistence farmers on great swathes of land." Moreover, practical and logistical problems persist. "At one of the first farms to be invaded and resettled in 1996, in Svosve Cave near Marondera, each farming family has 38 hectares. However, they are only able to farm five hectares each year and even that is only with the help of the destitute ex-farm labourers who are still squatting in the area." In addition, "because of poor management, limited labour and lack of irrigation the average subsistence farmer gets around one tenth of the yield that a commercial farmer can get from the same area of land." She added that the situation was made worse by the fact that around one third of households are headed by women and many men are weakened by HIV/ AIDS. Like many other expatriate development experts in Zimbabwe, Page believes that rampant corruption ranks among the most critical factors in turning Zimbabwe from southern Africa's breadbasket into a net food importer. "Corruption and mismanagement of the Grain Marketing Board in 2000 caused the strategic grain reserve to fall to lower levels than normal. 2001 yielded a poor harvest and practically no harvest of rain-fed maize in 2002. Disruption of the commercial farming sector over the past two years has left the grain silos almost empty." So what is required of humanitarian and relief organisations? "In the short-term they must provide the region with food aid. In Zimbabwe they must try to ensure that it gets through in equal measure, both to opposition supporters and ZANU-PF members, and their children," Page stressed. "Zimbabwe is operating the old colonial 'food for work programme' and I recently came across an HIV positive widow who had collapsed after working in one of these programmes, reclaiming gulleys, and is now bed- ridden with only her 15-year old daughter to nurse her." In the long-term, Page told the Weekly, humanitarian and relief organisations, "should fund primary and secondary education, especially for orphans, as well as civil society organisations that promote human rights and empower the people".
