Leading economist lied

One of Zimbabwe’s leading and most quoted economists John Robertson told the British Broadcasting Corporation two years ago that most of the land that had been allocated to blacks under the country’s land reform programme lay vacant when this was not true according to a new book: Zimbabwe takes back its land.

The book authored by Joseph Hanlon, Jeanette Manjengwa and Teresa Smart says the head of the white Commercial Farmers Union, Charles Tafts made a similar claim to the BBC when he toured Banket with journalist Martin Plaut.

It says Plaut saw “derelict fields, with hardly anything..” and then asked: “If I had been here ten years ago, what would I have seen?”

Tafts replied: “You would have seen green fields throughout.”

The authors say November is a dry season and even with irrigation you would not have seen “green fields throughout”.

They say the black disaster myth that was being spread by those against the land reform programme was far from the truth as the new farmers were more productive than the white farmers that they had replaced.

At independence, the authors say 30 percent of the just over 4 000 white farmers were insolvent, another 30 percent broke even but did not make any profit, 30 percent made a small profit and only 5 percent were very profitable.

They interviewed new black farmers some of whom had turnover of $100 000 a year and small-scale farmers or A1 farmers who made a profit of about $10 000 and were more productive than the white farmers they had replaced.

They say that while it takes at least a generation for new farmers to settle down, Zimbabwe’s black farmers had quickly turned around despite the hyperinflation that crippled farming.

While white farmers used less than a third of their farm land at independence, the land audit in 2006 found that 4 percent of the A2 farms were highly productive, 51 percent were productive, 37 percent were under-utilised and 7 percent were not used.

Besides, most of the A2 (small to medium-sized commercial farmers) were financing their own operations yet under the Rhodesian government farmers were subsidised to the tune of $40 000 a farmer a year.

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