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Landed
Economies: Farming & Farmers Then & Now - 'Progress' in
Zimbabwe Conference
Amanda
Atwood, Kubatana.net
November 08, 2010
'Progress' in
Zimbabwe Conference index
page
View audio file details
Speaker:
Blessing Karumbidza
Discussants: Jocelyn Alexander, Easther Chigumira
Key Participants: Lionel Cliffe, Wilbert Sadomba, Ben Cousins, Philan
Zamchiya, Joe Hanlon
Blessing Karumbidza
opened the discussion with a look at land and agriculture from the
context of its potential to meet livelihood needs.
He argued that the liberation
of 1980 was "substitution by elimination" - the
system of production remained the same. There was the potential
for greater reform in production with the opening up of access to
supporting institutions and the increased production in communal
areas, but there was no increase in the land mass on which to produce.
Whilst there was rhetorical support for peasant farming in the 1980s,
nothing substantive was done to create that.
Karumbidza then asked
if the land occupation movement was an example of the structure,
the system of production, finally changing. He argued that this
period was a result of the 1980s potential for increased peasant
production not having been actualised. This, he argued created both
the MDC and the land occupation movement. He noted that several
factors about the new farmers present reasons for optimism, including
the fact that there is a broader spectrum of large, medium and small
scale farmers, that people with different means can now access land,
and a restructuring of ownership and access.
Responding to
Karumbidza's presentation, Easther Chigumira questioned his
convictions that farming "then" (as in the 1980s) is
really so different from farming "now." She noted there
is still multiple farm ownership, still patronage, still bifurcation,
but it is by class, not race. Key institutional structures, such
as markets, are weaker than they were in the 1980s. Thus, she said,
she was not as optimistic about new farmers, particularly given
the long term degradation of the environment which has happened
in the process. There is gold panning, sand mining, organised by
suitcase farmers. Is that really progress?
Listen
Lionel Cliff noted that
everyone has an opinion about land in Zimbabwe. The farther you
get away from the reality the clearer your opinion is. When you
have major structural change, the actual outcome bears very little
resemblance to the policies proposed. Resettlement in 1980s was
translocation, shifting people, with an idea that they wouldn't
leave the place they'd been resettled to, and a notion that
they would become full time farmers, not proletariat. But neither
of those things happened. People who went to resettlement didn't
give up their old land and didn't stay away from city jobs.
Ben Cousins
observed that evaluating Zimbabwe's agrarian reform is a remarkably
difficult thing to do. What Cousins has discovered talking about
the findings from the Livelihoods
off the Land Reform study is how difficult it is for all of
us to accept messy contradictory complicated reality. The idea that
it is profoundly contradictory is a very difficult to grasp and
accept. Cousins then shared some of the ways in which it is so contradictory
and ultimately ambiguous. He stated that recent studies by his team
and others has shown real evidence that there are many positives
to the last decade - in terms of changed structure of ownership,
and a new emerging agrarian structure that goes beyond land ownership
and just farming to the entire way the agrarian economy functions.
Listen
However, Cousins
noted, land reform is not sufficient; it is not enough of a solution
to the poverty of the people. Some of the negatives of this redistribution
include that the collapse of large scale commercial farming contributed
in some way to economic decline. There was a weakening of democratic
institutions, and a decline of rule of law. Will the redistribution
succeed in the long term? This will depend on the behaviour of the
state.
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