Achim Blume (1996): Land Tenure in Rural Zimbabwe

2. The Resettlement Program

2.1 The Resettlement Program as an Element of a New Agricultural Policy

The Resettlement Program announced immediately after Independence was only part of the planned restructuring package for the agricultural sector. The reform package aimed, on the one hand, to reshape agricultural policy and on the other hand, under the Resettlement Program per se, to redress the unequal distribution of land between black small-scale and white large-scale farmers.

The overall intention was to support the smallholder sector in moving away from subsistence farming towards production for the market. Some essential elements of agricultural policy therefore consisted in opening up state marketing, financing and advisory organisations to smallholders and in strengthening these farmers’ financial, material and personnel resources (the agricultural policy is set out in detail in Bogedain 1993:53 et seq. and Rukuni 1992:21 et seq.).

The success of this agricultural policy was also quite tangible for a time in the mid-Eighties. However, many experts took the view that the key socio-economic problems were closely connected with solving the land issue.

According to the political perspective of the socialist ZANU government, the core of the land problem lay quite simply in the inequality of land distribution and for that reason land reform was concentrated purely on this issue. On the other hand, the precise form of real property rights, which is regarded by experts today as a very important question, has played no major role in the Resettlement Program to date. In future, however, this is the real, central issue which the Zimbabwean government and its advisers will have to address in detail.