Call for assistance to displaced farm workers

More than 500,000 Zimbabweans have been forced to leave their homes since the start of the government's controversial "fast track" land reform programme, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has claimed. In a recent report, "Displaced and forgotten: Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Zimbabwe", the NRC estimated that since the government's takeover of commercial farms began almost three years ago, some 240,000 farm workers had lost their jobs. Although some ex-commercial farm workers had been able to continue living in farm compounds, "many of those without resources have become internally displaced". Food security was a key concern, since large numbers of farm workers had no access to land during the 2002/2003 season, while internal displacement had taken its toll on the most vulnerable members of the farm worker population. "These are, in particular, people who are unattractive as labour for the new farmers and who do not have the resources required to find long-term resettlement opportunities. It includes, among others, the elderly, female-headed households, orphans and people in poor health, e.g. HIV/AIDS victims," the report stated. Farm worker representative groups told IRIN that in some cases former farm workers found themselves drifting from farm to farm seeking temporary shelter and employment. "We have noticed that people have found ways of coping. Gold panning is a major activity in some parts, but also, families have resorted to selling firewood and even their own personal assets. Unfortunately, there are those who have turned to commercial sex as way of making money to buy food," Farm Community Trust of Zimbabwe (FCTZ) director Godfrey Magaramombe said. Initially the situation was made all the more precarious as many labourers were excluded from food aid programmes. "That situation has been slightly remedied as donors have been forthcoming. We are feeding about 100,000 ex-farm workers and about 160,000 children. But our capacity is limited and we can only manage so far with the little resources," Magaramombe said. While farm workers were the majority of the casualties of land reform in Zimbabwe, political activists, "especially during elections periods", also faced continuous displacement, the NRC said. "While in the past the [ruling] ZANU-PF youth militias and the war veterans focused much of their violence on rural areas, since 2002 the capital, Harare, and its suburbs (often opposition strongholds) as well as other major cities have become the focus for the ruling party's campaign to suppress the opposition," the NRC claimed. IRIN was unable to obtain comment from the government on Friday. Among its recommendations the refugee NGO called for a countrywide survey to assess the needs and coping mechanisms used by ex-farm workers. However, before such an assessment was conducted, the NRC called on the government and the humanitarian community to agree on how to include farm labourers in their food aid programmes. There was also an urgent need to give ex-commercial farm workers access to land and farm inputs before the 2003/2004 agricultural season. "This could include more ex-farm workers being included in the government's land distribution scheme as well as finding temporary solutions to use the largely under-utilised land allocated for commercial farming." the report said.