Land to be reallocated to "serious and committed" farmers

About 400 of the farms recovered so far from senior government officials who ignored a presidential directive and held multiple properties will be given to farmers who are "serious and committed" to agricultural production, authorities said on Monday. "The land will only be reallocated to farmers who have experience and are able to prove that they intend to use the land for the sole purpose of agricultural production. Property speculators will not be considered," government spokesman Steyn Berejena told IRIN. The government has yet to announce when reallocation will begin, but Berenjena acknowledged that there was a waiting list of people who were "very eager to move onto the land in order to begin farming". In July last year President Robert Mugabe ordered top officials of his ruling ZANU-PF party to give up excess farms if they had acquired more than one under the country's fast-track land redistribution programme. "There is now consensus that we are moving towards a fairer distribution of land, so that there isn't one group of individuals who has more land than they deserve," Berenjena added. In 2000 Mugabe's government appropriated white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to landless blacks. However, since the start of the controversial programme, the government has been widely criticised for allowing ZANU PF's top hierarchy to grab some prime farms. Last year Mugabe appointed a committee headed by the former chief secretary to the cabinet, Charles Utete, to assess the resettlement programme. The "Utete Report" found that a number of top ZANU-PF officials owned multiple farms, prompting Mugabe to issue a directive to officials to hand over excess land within two weeks. It also noted that almost 40 percent of land made available for commercial farming had not been taken up by beneficiaries. The government cited a lack of farming equipment and inputs, and the difficulties resettled farmers faced in obtaining loans from banks as reasons for the slow uptake. Critics have argued that the land reform programme was implemented in a haphazard way, leaving many resettled farmers without the necessary support. However, Berenjena dismissed these claims, saying the government had embarked on a number of assistance programmes that targeted newly resettled farmers. "Of course there is the problem of funding but with the little that is available the government has assisted farmers with seeds and fertiliser. This has been ongoing - even those individuals who will be given the land that has been recovered will be given assistance," he said. Meanwhile the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was less optimistic that the recovered land would be benefit those most in need. MDC's shadow minisiter of agriculture Renson Gasela told IRIN: "We don't expect that this land redistribution process would be any fairer than the previous one. We suspect that the beneficieries are likley to be those who were left out the first time, namely some of the top ranking soldiers in the army." More than 200,000 landless black Zimbabweans have been resettled onto about 11 million hectares of land since the start of the land reform programme.