Episode 1: A Story of Two Farms

In Zimbabwe, the story of the land is the story of everything. It’s the economy, it’s the politics, it’s the heart of the nation.

I was born in Zimbabwe into a family that had been farming the land for generations. We farmed near Gweru in the country’s midlands. It was in some ways a tough existence, in others, a beautiful and free one.

My childhood was defined by a moment of profound national upheaval. This was in the early 2000s during the time of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme.

I was a boy when my family was forced from our farm.

We lost our home, our livelihood, and our community.

My parents made a difficult choice and moved my brothers and me to Australia. We started a new life and were afforded the privilege and opportunity most other Zimbabweans weren’t, and we embraced our new lives.

The move wasn’t easy. The violence and the eviction left a lasting mark, and I carried the weight of that trauma with me for years.

I had the opportunity to turn away, and to leave the painful memories behind. But I couldn’t. Zimbabwe called me back.

I felt a yearning to return, and to put my energy into better understanding and working to fix the challenges that caused so much pain.

In 2021, I moved to the remote south-west of Zimbabwe in the Beitbridge District. This is one of the hottest, driest, harshest parts of Zimbabwe.

I was embarking on an audacious project working to transform the lives of rural communities. We would work with communities to change the way they manage their land, helping to reverse the degradation and turn it into a source of prosperity.

It was a mammoth undertaking, and I was dealing with the most difficult problem of all—land.

We lived in a rundown old house with no consistent water or electricity.

We navigated a complex political system and we encountered even more complex social structures as we worked to persuade a community of 20,000 people to change their way of doing things.

In the end, after four years on the ground, developing a phenomenal team and making some very significant, tangible progress, we fell short. The context on the ground proved too resistant to change.

This failure forced me to ask difficult questions. Why is farming in Zimbabwe so hard? Why does every solution seemingly hit a different challenge? Why is the poverty so stubborn?

Just at the moment when I was grappling with these questions, I won a Nuffield Scholarship.

I travelled the world and visited over 100 farms and agribusinesses across five continents. I was blown away by the scale of farming in Brazil. I studied the collective success of New Zealand’s dairy systems. And I was also surprised, and concerned, at how Kenya, a country I had always perceived as one of Africa’s agricultural leaders, was still grappling with how to move on from its colonial past.

I was looking for a roadmap and searching for models that could make Zimbabwean agriculture resilient, inclusive, and sustainable.

In order to make informed decisions about the future, we need to look back and understand what’s played out in the past.

Before British colonisation in 1890, the area we now call Zimbabwe was home to the Shona and Ndebele, along with several other ethnic groups. Farming was largely subsistence-based, meaning they grew their own food, had their own livestock, and took part in hunting.

Shifting cultivation was common — meaning people would farm an area for a while, then move on, allowing the land to rest and recover.

When European settlers moved into Zimbabwe, they initially targeted gold and other minerals. When mining largely failed, they then shifted their focus to agriculture.

From the mid-1890s onward, “Native Reserves” were created, pushing indigenous communities onto land that was generally hotter, drier, and less productive.

That reality was later locked into law through the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which formally partitioned land by race.

The best farming regions, with higher rainfall and better soils, were reserved for white settlers, while the majority of indigenous people were confined to marginal areas that became increasingly overcrowded.

By independence in 1980, about 6,000 white commercial farmers — less than 1% of the population — controlled around 40% of the country’s farmland.

This created The Two Farms. They operated side-by-side but belonged to two different worlds.

Let’s look at Farm Number One: The Commercial Farm.

The commercial farm was an engine of export. It was highly productive.

The government poured extensive resources into it.

There was capital, and settlers were given easy access to bank loans.

They used their land as collateral and they could borrow for decades, investing in long-term infrastructure.

There was technology, with research institutions built specifically to support these commercial farms. The first was built as early as 1909, less than 20 years after the first settlers arrived.

This farm was a machine of profit. It produced high-value crops, and by 1980 it generated 60% of the country’s export earnings.

What the settlers were able to achieve in a short space of time to make Zimbabwe the bread basket of Africa was a monumental feat.

But it was built on injustice. It depended on cheap labour, often living in substandard conditions.

It enriched a few, and was built on a system of inequality.

Now let’s contrast that with Farm Two: The Cycle of Poverty.

This second farm is the Communal Lands.

This is where the majority of the rural indigenous population was forced to live. The land became severely overcrowded.

The increased population density quickly destroyed the traditional farming techniques that had sustained indigenous populations up to this point.

The soil quickly degraded. The trees were cut down for fuel.

The farmers received little government support. Little meaningful research was directed to their crops. Some infrastructure and irrigation schemes were established, but this was a fraction of what was directed towards the commercial farms.

There was no title deed, so these farmers could not use their land to get a loan.

They could not invest long-term. They could not buy machinery. They were trapped by poverty.

They were locked into a cycle of low production. Their families typically relied on the erratic rain.

When droughts hit, they lost it all.

People therefore had to go and find low-paid work on farms and in factories in order to feed their families.

This underdevelopment was not an accident. It was the direct consequence of colonial policies.

The law divided the land, and the law also divided the opportunity.

These issues to do with land and inequality were central to the liberation war that was fought from the 1960s up to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.

After independence, the Zimbabwean government tried to undertake a program of land redistribution through a slow-moving “willing buyer, willing seller” model in the 1980s and 90s. Ultimately, it moved too slowly and didn’t meaningfully redistribute land.

A critical turning point occurred in February 2000 when the government was defeated in a national constitutional referendum.

This defeat, coupled with the escalating political and economic pressures, served as a catalyst for the radicalisation of land reform.

Land reform therefore became a tool for the government’s political survival and power consolidation. The Fast Track Land Reform Programme succeeded in redistributing the land. But it came at a terrible cost to productivity. The economy of the country entirely collapsed.

It is the Fast Track Land Reform Programme that shaped my childhood, and in many respects, my life. It is also the Fast Track Land Reform Programme that has shaped the current state of agriculture in Zimbabwe.

Join me for the next episode as we dive into the history of the Fast Track Land Reform, the economic collapse that followed, and the crucial reforms that are defining our future right now.

Just a quick note that I’ve glossed over a lot of detail in this episode — for a more comprehensive overview, a link to my Nuffield report is in the show notes.

Links

Check out my Nuffield Report on the Future of Farming in Zimbabwe here

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