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The recovery and transformation of Zimbabwe's communal areas
Dale Dore, United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
July 24, 2009

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This paper is part of the Comprehensive Economic Recovery in Zimbabwe Working Paper Series

Executive Summary

At independence in 1980 Zimbabwe inherited a dual agrarian structure that had seen white commercial farmers prosper in good farming areas while hundreds of thousands of poor black families struggled to subsist on smallholdings in the communal areas, much of it in semi-arid areas with poor soils. It was estimated that there were nearly three times more people living in the communal areas than the land could sustain. The Zimbabwe Government therefore prioritized the communal areas for development by intensifying agriculture and initiating a programme of resettlement and migration to decongest them. The smallholder sector made significant gains, surpassing the commercial sector in maize and cotton production in the mid-1980s. Ambitious plans were laid to intensify production by land-use reorganization and establishing consolidated villages in which to concentrate physical and social infrastructure. The resettlement programme aimed to resettle 162,000 families, while over 300,000 families were expected to migrate to towns and cities. But these hopes faded by the end of the 1980s. Output declined, village planning stalled, the rate of resettlement slowed to a trickle, and the expected migration of households to urban centres failed to materialize. In the meantime, the communal area population had swelled to about one million households.

In 1994 the Land Tenure Commission made far-reaching recommendations for addressing the underlying problems facing the communal lands, but the government's attentions had turned to land redistribution. After the government launched its fast track land resettlement programme in 2000, it poured huge resources into sustaining newly resettled farmers, but did little to assist communal smallholders. As the government took control over domestic food supplies, communal families became increasingly dependent on international humanitarian and food aid.

Since the formation of the inclusive government, the emphasis has been on maintaining the required levels of international humanitarian assistance through food aid, smallholder cropping packs, seed fairs and vouchers to improve household food security. As soon as Zimbabwe's government re-engages fully with the donor community, it should reduce dependence on such handouts and stimulate smallholder production by opening up agricultural credit, input and commodity markets. It then needs to address the underlying and pervasive constraints that make smallholder agricultural production untenable in most communal areas.

The pressure of population, under a traditional farming system that provides cost-free access to land, results in the continual subdivision of household plots that are too small to sustain livelihoods based on agricultural production, especially in the semi-arid regions. By enabling some farmers to consolidate their holdings into more viable units, while facilitating the transfer of others into alternative non-farm livelihoods, both the remaining farmers and those engaged in higher productivity non-farm activities will benefit significantly. The basic mechanism for this process of commercialization, migration and poverty reduction is a land rental and sales market. The second necessary condition to enable this structural transformation of the rural economy is rapid economic growth in the manufacturing and service sectors of the economy. Over time, as development proceeds, commercialization and transformation will dissolve the existing dual agrarian structure, intensify agricultural production and decongest the communal areas.

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