Land reform in Zimbabwe

Land reform in Zimbabwe officially began in 1980 with the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement, as a program to redistribute farmland from white Zimbabweans to black Zimbabweans as an effort by the ZANU-PF government to give more control over the country's extensive farmlands to the black African majority. Before the implementation of these policies, the distribution of land in what was then known as Rhodesia saw a population of 4,400 white Rhodesians owning 51% of the country's land while 4.3 million black Rhodesians owned 42%, with the remainder being non-agricultural land.^[1] The discrepancy of this distribution, as well as the overall dominance of the white population in the newly-independent but largely unrecognized Rhodesian state was challenged by the black nationalist organizations ZANU and ZAPU in the Rhodesian Bush War. At the establishment of the modern Zimbabwean state in 1980 after the bush war, the Lancaster House Agreement held a clause that prohibited forced transfer of land, this resulted in changes in land distribution from the willing sale or transfer by owners being minor until 2000, when the government of Robert Mugabe began a more aggressive policy.^[2]

The government's land reform policy is perhaps the most controversial and contested political issue surrounding Zimbabwe. It has been criticised for the violence and intimidation which marred several expropriations, as well as the parallel collapse of domestic banks which held billions of dollars' worth of bonds on liquidated properties.^[3] The United Nations has identified several key shortcomings with the contemporary programme, namely failure to compensate ousted landowners as called for by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the poor handling of boundary disputes, and chronic shortages of material and personnel needed to carry out resettlement in an orderly manner.^[4] Several farm owners and even more farm workers have been killed during violent takeovers.^[5]

Land reform has had a serious negative effect on the Zimbabwean economy and is argued to have heavily contributed to its collapse in the 2000s.^[6][7] There has been a drop in total farm output which has led to instances of starvation and famine.^[8] Increasing poverty levels combined with the increased informality of farming operations amongst farmers who received redistributed land has led to an increase in the use of child labour especially in the growing of sugar cane.^[9]

As of 2011, 237,858 Zimbabwean households had been provided with access to land under the programme. A total of 10,816,886 hectares had been acquired since 2000, compared to the 3,498,444 purchased from voluntary sellers between 1980 and 1998.^[4] By 2013, every white-owned farm in Zimbabwe had been either expropriated or confirmed for future redistribution.^[10] The compulsory acquisition of farmland without compensation was discontinued in early 2018.^[11] In 2019, the Commercial Farmers Union stated that white farmers who had land expropriated under the fast track program had agreed to accept an interim compensation offer by the Zimbabwean government of RTGS$53 million (US$17 million) as part of the government effort to compensate dispossessed farmers.^[12] A year later, the Zimbabwean government announced that it would be compensating dispossessed white farmers for infrastructure investments in the land and had committed to pay out US$3.5 billion.^[13][14] Compensation efforts continued in 2024.^[15]