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JAG comment on World Bank Report No. 3199 ZW
Justice for Agriculture (JAG) Zimbabwe
June 20, 2005

Read JAG's covering letter

The World Bank appears to have made a concerted attempt to legitimise Zimbabwe's ruling party's decision to force the closure of thousands of successful businesses and to empower its political supporters to confiscate the physical assets and personal property of a racial minority. While the report is highly critical of the results achieved so far by the beneficiaries of the ruling party-sponsored looting of the country's principal economic sector, it makes no mention of the massive injustices inflicted on commercial farmers and their families, or on the farmers' employees and their families. Where mentioned, the damage done to the economy is treated as merely incidental to a greater, praiseworthy wealth redistribution objective.

At no point in the report do its authors recognise that the considerable technical and financial skills of the commercial farmers, acquired over many years, accounted for their success. Neither do they acknowledge that this success was regularly achieved despite highly uncertain weather and despite the many severe difficulties imposed by constraints on the economy. These skills constitute the real wealth of the farmers and farm workers this wealth could not be made subject to the redistribution process. Frequent references are made to drought and other weather-related reasons for the inadequate performance and disappointing harvests since the land reform programme was launched. In fact, the weather patterns in these years have been unexceptional. Most commercial farmers would have taken the temporary setbacks in their stride, had they been left to continue farming. The World Bank appears to feel justified in remaining silent on the social dimensions of the destruction of Zimbabwe's largest industrial sector, largest employer, largest export-revenue earner, largest source of manufacturing sector inputs and largest customer for industrial and commercial supplies.

Because of the Zimbabwe government's disregard for these complex inter-linkages, every sector of the economy has suffered a severe decline, gross domestic product per capita has fallen below one US dollar per day, foreign investment inflows have stopped, domestic investment has been almost arrested by the confiscation of domestic savings by government and a high proportion of the country's skilled workers have had to leave the country to find work.

The report is devoid of any reference to the desirability of economies of scale, which were made possible by large-scale operations that, in turn, made farming a profitable pursuit. Instead the World Bank refers to subsidies, grants, donor funding and other support mechanisms for sustaining what would have to be hundreds of thousands of unprofitable small-scale farms. The fact that Zimbabwe, as a developing country, cannot afford to fund subsidies and grants and would be forced to remain perpetually dependent on aid appears not to be considered a serious issue by the World Bank.

Unfortunately, the authors of the report have accepted without question the Zimbabwe government's claim that severe overcrowding in the communal areas fully justified the dispossession of commercial farmers and the reallocation of their land to small-scale and peasant farmers. The fact is that communal areas were short of capital and management skills, not space. The dual land tenure system in Zimbabwe had its origins in the early colonisers' belief that the indigenous population's agricultural methods and traditions should be respected and that extensive areas under their tutelage should be protected from the buying power of others as colonial development continued.

The intention was praiseworthy. It was to protect the communities from the dispossession that had overwhelmed the American Indians, the Aborigines, the Maoris and many others and had led to the marginalisation of the peoples in restrictive, confining reservations.

Unfortunately, the result was to isolate the communities from the development they could have enjoyed if they had been persuaded to permit their traditions to adapt and respond to changing technologies. Equally important, faster development would have allowed them to keep pace with the population explosion that came with the near-eradication of the causes of very high infant mortality and the generally short life expectancy. By surveying, registering, and ascribing transferable title and a market value to the land they occupied, settler communities had access to bank finance as they learned how to survive and then to prosper on the land. Without question, the commercial farming sector has evolved and developed under the many advantages inherent in free hold titled tenure. Continual application, over the years, of good husbandry and farming practices, with rotations and break crops and other essential procedures, the farmers' efforts are assured and underwritten by the existence of transferable and bankable free hold title and the unfettered application of free market forces.

This gave rise to outstanding progress and development in this sector as well as viable and sustainable production levels, way above the levels achieved in the communal area model even when this is assessed on a return per overall hectare basis. But before long, the contrast between their performance and that of the traditional farmers became obvious and it then became a problem. Unfortunately, the colonial administration chose to ignore it.

The contrast between the commercial and communal farming areas later became as obvious in the condition of the soils as it was in the vastly different yields. Motivations are an important consideration in explaining the differences. Commercial farmers, with their determination to succeed heightened by their obligations to the banks, explored every possible means of preserving their soil's fertility and enhancing their productivity, but communal farmers faced no risk of foreclosure.

As a result, the communal farmers were not under pressure to perform. They achieved very little and very slow growth and very poor production levels as a result, but by keeping to their traditional farming methods, they caused rampant environmental degradation, especially with regard to soil fertility. They lacked the means to invest in the preservation of their soils, but also felt little need to do so as their hope was that, as in the past, they would be allocated another area to farm when they began to suffer unacceptable yields.

With the population growth that took place over succeeding decades, their prospects of moving to unoccupied areas diminished and then disappeared. The shortcomings of their self-limiting tenure system should then have become the focal point, but instead, they chose to concentrate their attention on the, by then, much better-looking lands being cultivated by commercial farmers.

Capitalising on the glaringly obvious differences, politicians were able to fan the disparities into claims that settlers had taken all the best land, that traditional farmers had been left with unproductive soils and that the only solution would be to dispossess the commercial farmers and allocate their land to peasants.

The policy-makers of more than 50 years ago were too short-sighted to anticipate inevitable land pressures and those of 40 years ago were able to justify a move to the hard-right by events elsewhere in Africa - Kenya and the then Belgian Congo in particular. Proposals that individual ownership rights and access to bank finance should be extended to communal farmers drew the response from Ian Smith's Rhodesia Front party that: "…we don't want to empower the indigenous population that much".

At independence in 1980, efforts to encourage the first Zimbabwean government to accept the need for individual ownership rights and title deeds in the communal areas received widespread support from the public, but were repeatedly countered by the politicians. Eventually, after about seven years of recurring debates, ruling party politicians were heard to admit: "We don't want to empower the people that much."

This is perhaps the best insight needed to recognise the recent events for what they are: a political programme of control of the citizenry through the destruction of the ownership rights of commercial farmers and the destruction of the independent power base that previously existed within the commercial agricultural sector.

By choice, the ruling party has sponsored poverty creation and food insecurity mechanisms to render the people of Zimbabwe vulnerable and politically malleable. They are now dependent on the party's patronage and on the state for food and security. As a result, totalitarian control has been achieved.

By definition, therefore, the way forward for Zimbabwean agriculture is through the total rejection and abandonment of the present so-called 'land reform programme'.

As an international organisation, the World Bank has ready access to comparative data on other countries that should have permitted the authors of this report to assess the basic claim that "severe overcrowding" in the communal areas gave the ruling party every right to acquire the commercial farmland for redistribution. Zimbabwe's average population density is 30 people per square kilometre, which by chance is exactly the same as the population density of the United States.

The area of Zimbabwe is almost the same as that of Germany, which has seven times Zimbabwe's population, but Germany does not complain of having overcrowded farming areas. Other comparisons show that Zimbabwe's communal areas total the same number of square kilometres as the area of England. If a comparison with a relatively more arid country is needed, Israel's population density is 280 people per square kilometre, almost ten times that of Zimbabwe.

The population density of Zimbabwe's communal areas appeared to be too high only because the farming methods and the land tenure system were, and still are, damaging to the soil fertility. These have always imposed limits on the range of options and the funding available to farmers. It should not have been difficult for the World Bank to point out in the report that a better option would have been for the communal areas to adopt the successful commercial farming methods and land tenure systems instead of to inflict the inefficient and consumptive communal area systems onto the commercial areas.

From these points, the claim can be made that Zimbabwe's ruling party has made totally dishonest accusations about an economically successful business sector in order to empower themselves to dispossess the targeted individuals of their political leverage and, in the process, their assets and their livelihood.

From the general thrust of the report, the claim can be made that the World Bank has accepted these dishonest allegations without question and is now content to offer advice on how the country might do something a little more useful with the inefficient system it has chosen to extend across the country.

While the report does make frequent references to land tenure issues, it does not mention the immense advantages of placing land onto the market, of permitting land to have a market-related price, of permitting individuals to have legally-defensible ownership and transferability rights and of thus permitting the land to have collateral value.

Title deeds, where they exist in an open market, form a bridge between the farming sector and the banking sector. Where they do not exist, the farmers ' isolation from the banks makes them dependent on hand-outs and patronage. It also undermines their need to do well to remain in business. By itself, the absence of a need to perform well is enough to explain a large part of the differences in the results achieved.

The institutionally-supported mediocrity that results from this paternalistic system should not be the World Bank's prescription for Zimbabwe's future.

In other respects, the World Bank report is a fund of valuable and very detailed information and the authors display a wide-ranging appreciation of the support mechanisms needed to integrate the numerous facets of centrally planned and state-controlled resources. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of this material disguises the absence of any justification for choosing or supporting command economy or central planning options instead of open market options.

The report also makes no reference to the highly specialised seed production capacity that had been created over many decades and effectively underpinned the success of the country's farmers by catering to widely differing growing conditions. Experienced seed producers could ensure consistent quality and high germination percentages by ensuring that seed crops were isolated from cross-fertilisation possibilities and were properly protected from contamination.

The land reform programme displaced almost all these specialist farmers. The seed companies have since found it impossible to meet the required quality standards and to supply the volumes needed. Imported seed is mostly found to have been produced for climatic conditions and altitudes different from those found in Zimbabwe and this partly explains the disappointing yields.

Zimbabwe needs an unequivocal return to the rule of law and respect for subsisting property rights of the individual citizen as enshrined in the constitution and laws of Zimbabwe. The "land hunger" alluded to by the ruling party is and was non-existent and this is born out by higher priority given to job opportunities rather than land in recent surveys. It also explains the poor uptake of the land acquired. If there was ever any shortage of land, that shortage pertained and is confined to titled land because of its inherent ability to raise the necessary capital for production and development.

Government's purchases of land over the past 25 years and its removal from the market have been part of its attempts to systematically destroy title and ownership rights, and this has only exacerbated the shortage situation and added to poverty creation. The sidelining and marginalisation of commercial farmer and farm worker skills in the so called "fast track land reform program" bears witness to and stands as testimony to this being entirely a political program of destruction and control and also a programme embarked upon by design and not by default.

While the study recognises that so far the newly imposed arrangements in the farming sector have not worked, it chooses to adopt a wholly unacceptable objective of showing how they might be made to work a little better. It seems that, to the World Bank, an acceptable target is to achieve second-rate results for people who have no right to higher expectations.

Instead of attempting to identify ways that Zimbabwe could make slow and limited progress despite having made disastrous choices, the World Bank should, instead, have shown that the reforms were politically motivated and the chosen options had nothing whatever to recommend them. They could have pointed out that whatever means had been chosen to carry them through, they could never have delivered anything even approaching the true potential of the country.

And they should have observed that criminal injustices were inflicted on communities that were guilty of nothing other than achieving genuine success as farmers, and that no formal assistance should be forthcoming from any international body before full restitution or compensation had been made to all those affected.

In references to the issue of compensation in the report, the focus has been confined to the necessity to compensate for the land and improvements, but only in order to prevent continuing litigation from undermining the security of any subsequent tenure system, such as the proposed 99 year leases that might replace the existing tenure system.

As a basis for this dismissive treatment, the report contends that only 20% of the land acquisition orders are being legally contested. In fact, the acquisition of 80% of the land is still being legally contested in the courts. Furthermore, less than 200 of the thousands of farmers targeted have been compensated and none were compensated adequately or timeously. For the vast majority, even though the acquisitions remain contested, the owners were illegally and forcibly evicted and had standing crops, livestock and farm equipment confiscated.

These actions have given rise to substantial damage and other loss claims arising from the loss of business as well as the loss of property. In most cases, five years down the line, these claims vastly exceed the value of the land and improvements at the outset. With the additional claims for lost incomes and property suffered by about 300 000 workers and their families, the totals come to very considerable amounts, but the authors of the World Bank report appear not to have considered the subject worthy of mention, let alone analysis.

The brief references to the preservation of wildlife show no recognition of the contributions made by commercial farmers to conservation and bio-diversity over the years. Neither does the report acknowledge the fact that private conservancies in Zimbabwe had led the way in Africa in achieving the sustainable utilisation of wildlife through consumptive and non-consumptive eco-tourism.

Zimbabwe has been, and is still today earmarked as a World Tourism Centre. The country was able to boast of an incomparable situation of more wildlife in existence on privately owned land than in National Parks and State Wildlife Areas, but in the past five years, since the introduction of "fast track land reform", most of the wildlife on private land has been systematically destroyed. The assault now has moved to the National Parks and State Wildlife Areas themselves.

Estimates place the losses at between 60% and 80% of the animals having been slaughtered in the fast track exercise. Partly because of this, the tourism industry has virtually collapsed and eco-tourism has become a thing of the past. Indigenous forests on formerly productive estates have suffered a similar fate as resettled peasant farmers in search of cash incomes cut down slow-growing hardwood trees for sale as firewood. If the destruction is not stopped, recovery itself will become an unrealistic prospect.

The ruling party's attack on commercial agriculture has several social dimensions that received no coverage in the World Bank report. Before the land reform programme started, commercial farmers provided a standard of health, education and housing that was far superior to that provided in the neighbouring communal areas and the contrast between the quality of services often caused embarrassment to the authorities when highlighted as evidence of the States lack of commitment to communal area development. Almost every commercial farm provided or co-operated with neighbours to provide on-farm health schemes for farm-workers, support for local clinics, on-farm pre-school crèches with playgrounds, on-farm schools or support for local area schools, on-farm adult education, instruction on prevention of HIV-AIDS and support for AIDS orphans. Close to one million children attended the farm schools and this number reached almost 40% of the total junior school enrolment of the country.

As a measure of the devastation caused by the land reform programme, very nearly all of this social infrastructure has now collapsed. Many of the displaced families have been forced to relocate to communal areas where the already inadequate health and education facilities cannot be further stretched to absorb the additional people.

Unacceptable hardships forced many of the families to then relocate to squatter settlements near the towns and cities where they tried to subsist on informal activities. However, their swelling numbers prompted the authorities to launch the now infamous cleansing exercise that entailed the destruction of all squatter camps and unlicensed business premises. Estimates place the numbers of people displaced in May and June 2005 at well above a million, most of whom have been sent back to the impoverished communal areas.

At another level, the World Bank Report seems content to base its arguments on legal cornerstones that are fundamentally flawed because the very legitimacy of the government is itself questionable. The World Bank accepts almost without question the proposal that non-tradable non-bankable 99 year leases should be substituted for the current free-hold title deeds.

The fact that this form of land tenure would be hopelessly ineffective in encouraging the necessary investment is not mentioned, but on legal considerations the more glaring omission is that the Land Acquisition Act is contrary to the protection of private property provisions in the Constitution. This renders fraudulent the ruling party's claim that the government has been empowered to carry out the land acquisition programme. As the ruling party dismissed or forced the early retirement of judges who did not issue judgements in their favour, it can also be argued that the integrity of the entire judiciary and legal structure in Zimbabwe has been compromised. As an international body that has every reason to want to be deserving of respect, the World Bank should not risk discrediting itself by legitimising the actions of a widely discredited government.

The World Bank cannot have any doubt that the legality of the ruling party' s claim to have won the electorate's mandate is itself questionable. Sanctions have been applied against the ruling party's senior politicians by many western governments and Zimbabwe has been expelled from the Commonwealth because of evidence of electoral fraud and because the party has prevented charges on the issues from reaching the courts. On the reasonable assumption that they were fearful of loosing the cases, even after subverting the Bench, the ruling party should have been regarded by the World Bank as illegal and unworthy of assistance.

While the status of the ruling party is held in question, all Acts of Parliament, Statutory Instruments and the Land Acquisition Orders themselves should be considered illegal, as should any proposed new lease agreements. No country can build an agricultural or any other industry on leases of disputed legitimacy.

Resolutions:
The Justice for Agriculture Trust strongly advocates that free hold title to land, all land, once established through existing laws, with boundaries surveyed, legally documented and protected by the constitution, should be treated as sacrosanct. The preservation of that title as existing security of tenure especially with regard to individual ownership of agricultural land by Zimbabwean citizens is in the national Interest and should be fought for by every Zimbabwean citizen, regardless of colour, race, creed or political affiliation.

We strongly believe, not only in the preservation and restoration of existing freehold title to agricultural land but also the expansion of freehold title and other just tenure systems into the communal areas of Zimbabwe as a move to redress the historical injustices inherent in the Inherited dual system of land ownership in Zimbabwe.

The Justice for Agriculture Trust adheres strongly to the belief and continues to advocate that true freedom and empowerment of the citizens of Zimbabwe will only come through individual ownership of property and land in Zimbabwe and as we have an agriculturally based economy, particularly the individual ownership of agricultural land.

Zimbabwe's ruling party has indisputably espoused and promulgated a so-called "land reform programme" that is the antithesis of this and that the world Bank appears to be prepared to condone and support. We believe that the World Bank is not only in danger of aligning itself with a programme fraught with illegality and injustices, but in doing so it would also become complicit to gross human rights abuses, if not crimes against humanity.

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