Zimbabwe Announces a New Plan to Seize Land

by Michael Wines

JOHANNESBURG, June 8 - Zimbabwe's land minister said Tuesday that the government intended to nationalize all farmland that it had not already confiscated under a contentious program of land seizures begun four years ago.

The minister, John Nkomo, said the government planned to take control of remaining farmland, abolishing all deeds, and turn it back to farmers under 99-year leases. Leases on wildlife conservancies would be limited to 25 years, he said, because that land is considered more valuable than farmland.

"Ultimately, all land shall be resettled as state property,'' Mr. Nkomo was quoted as saying Tuesday in the government-controlled newspaper The Herald. "It will now be the state which will enable the utilization of the land for national prosperity."

Mr. Nkomo urged farmers to volunteer their land to the state rather than wait for an order, saying, "The state should not be made to waste time and money on acquisitions."

But he offered few other details, and as sweeping as the order sounded, it left many questions unanswered, including whether the government intended to take control of all farmland or merely to finish a nearly completed takeover of white commercial farms.

Very little white-owned farmland remains in the nation. The government has already confiscated more than 42,000 square miles of formerly white commercial farmland and game reserves, and only about 500 of the original 5,000 or so white farmers are believed to still hold property.

For now, at least, it was not clear whether the plan was meant to accelerate existing land confiscations, which have been blamed for the collapse of the nation's economy, or was in fact an effort to halt further damage from the seizures.

Zimbabwe's economy has been in free fall since 2000, when President Robert G. Mugabe's government began taking over white-owned commercial farms and redistributing the land, mostly to supporters of his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF.

The confiscations wrecked commercial farm exports as well as the chemical and machine industries, which supported agriculture. Foreign investors also fled, and the resulting shortages of goods and foreign exchange have halted economic growth and pushed inflation as high as 620 percent a year.

Zimbabwe's government says its economic problems have nothing to do with the land seizures and can be laid to drought and a Western plot to restore colonial rule.

The Voice of America quoted Zimbabwe's central bank governor, Gideon Gomo, as saying that the new program would bring direction to Zimbabwean economic policy by settling questions about land ownership, a crucial question in granting loans to develop property.

At present, none of those awarded portions of seized white commercial farms have title to their lands. Those peasants' inability to raise money to begin commercial farming on their own has been blamed by some for the nation's dismal harvests over the last three years.

Mr. Nkomo suggested in The Herald interview that a 99-year lease on land was tantamount to ownership, enabling the land to be used as collateral for loans. But other experts disputed that, saying that nothing short of a deed would persuade most bankers to accept land as collateral.

The opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, expressed concern that state ownership of all land would merely give the government another means to exert control over the population.

The New York Times Copyright