Situation Report: Zimbabwe, Reaping the Harvest?, Chris Maroleng

When Zimbabwe obtained its independence from Britain in 1980, it inherited an inequitable pattern of land distribution. The unbalanced pattern of land allocation was characterised by a small minority of white large-scale commercial farmers owning vast amounts of the most productive agricultural land while the majority of the population, made up exclusively of black Zimbabweans, were relegated to crowded lands in the lower rainfall and poorer soil areas. Some 6,000 white commercial farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of land, another 8,500 small-scale farmers possessed 1.4 million hectares. The remaining indigenous communal farmers, comprising roughly 700,000 households, subsisted on 16.4 million hectares, which represented less than half of the
country’s agricultural land.