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Harare - The Zimbabwe government plans to take back land from close to 2 000 black owners who have failed to farm and return it to whites, State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa has said. In a major policy reversal and the clearest admission yet by the Harare government that its controversial land redistribution programme failed, Mutasa said that the government had asked the white-member Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) to submit names of applicants to receive land repossessed from blacks. Mutasa, who spoke to Zim Online earlier this week on Tuesday, said: "We have set up land identification committees countrywide working at a provincial level. Figures coming from provinces indicate that there is still a lot of under-utilised land. Some people are not farming at all and we will take away this land. In some provinces, like Manicaland 200 farmers will lose their land to new owners."

Mutasa, a trusted confidante of President Robert Mugabe and who oversees land reform and food aid distribution on top of minding state security, said he and other government ministers had held meetings with the CFU leadership in the past weeks, adding that the white union now appreciated the government's land policy. He said the government wanted to boost farm production and end hunger in the country but some blacks allocated land had failed the government by failing to produce food. Whites will be brought back to revive food production but more blacks willing to farm would also get land, Mutasa said. Mutasa said: "We have held fruitful meetings with them (CFU leadership). They now seem to have a clear way forward and understanding on how to work with this government and we are happy with that. It was in this vein that we asked them to submit applications for land and these will be treated favourably. They are Zimbabweans like everyone else."

CFU vice-president Trevor Gifford confirmed his organisation had held talks with the government and had submitted names of former white farmers wishing to be allocated land by the government. Gifford said: "We have been talking to Honourable Mutasa and other ministers over the future of agriculture in this country. "In fact, we have just submitted to the government 200 applications for land from our members, and in the spirit of the talks we hope the applications will be treated favourably . . . . we could soon have our members farming again soon." Mugabe and his government have over the last six years chased away virtually all of Zimbabwe's 4 000 white farmers and gave their land to blacks in what Mugabe said was a correction of a colonial land tenure system that unfairly allocated all the best land to whites while blacks were cramped in poor arid regions. The farm seizures however destabilised the mainstay agricultural sector, plunging the economy further into the mire, while food production plummeted, leaving the once food self-sufficient southern African country dependent on handouts from international donors.

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