Black Farmer's Take on Land Reform

UNCLAS HARARE 000142 SIPDIS SENSITIVE STATE FOR AF/S AND AF/EX NSC FOR SENIOR AFRICA DIRECTOR JFRAZER USDOC FOR 2037 DIEMOND PASS USTR ROSA WHITAKER TREASURY FOR ED BARBER AND C WILKINSON USAID FOR MARJORIE COPSON ¶E. O. 12958: N/A TAGS: EFIN EAGR ECON ZI SUBJECT: Black Farmer's Take on Land Reform Sensitive but unclassified. ¶1. (U) Summary: A large-scale black commercial farmer believes most settlers on expropriated white commercial farms will fail and give up during 2003, leaving a future government to pick up the pieces of uncompensated land redistribution. At the same time, he expressed regret that white farmers did little to assist nascent black commercial farmers in the years before the GOZ began its controversial fast-track land reform. End Summary. ¶2. (SBU) Wilson Nyabonda has emerged as one of Zimbabwe's most successful black commercial farmers. We recently toured his vast tobacco, soybean, paprika and maize crops while exchanging views on Zimbabwean agriculture. Nyabonda believes Zimbabwe's so-called new farmers -- those resettled on seized white farms -- have little prospect of success. They and the GOZ overrated the value of land in farming, which Nyabonda calculates at 10 percent among other inputs. He sees no evidence new farmers are willing or able to invest the remaining 90 percent in seed, fertilizer, equipment, transport or workers. He is troubled by their lack of emotional commitment, evinced by the obsession among the politically-connected to take over the family houses of white farmers, then worry about crops later. Ethical considerations aside, Nyabonda feels a well-anointed house should be the "last" concern of a devoted farmer, and he himself is only building an upscale house after 8 years on his property. He also worries that his farm cannot comfortably coexist alongside many smaller new farms in an area where commercial farmers have always benefited from economies of scale. ¶3. (SBU) At the same time, Nyabonda recounted his frustration that the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU) did not provide support for him and other emerging black commercial farmers in the early-1990s. By 1995, most of them broke ranks and formed the Indigenous Commercial Farmers Union (ICFU),an association that is still thriving today. The CFU lived on as a white-farmer lobby, limiting its influence with the race-conscious GOZ. Comment -------------- ¶4. (SBU) Few Zimbabweans have much good to say about the GOZ's version of land reform, which has turned the breadbasket of Southern Africa into a beggar nation. However, white farmers -- regarded simultaneously as enterprising overachievers and vestiges of race-based privilege -- still provoke polarized sentiments. The truth is more nuanced. White farmers here ran the most productive agro-businesses anywhere, making Zimbabwe tops in world tobacco exports and inspiring black entrepreneurs like Nyabonda to follow in their footsteps. But along the way, they did not appreciate the need to embrace black commercial farmers -- equally business- savvy but with fewer advantages -- or the ticking time- bomb they epitomized and that President Mugabe finally exploded in the path of political opposition. Ironically, neither white nor recently resettled farmers, everyone's present focus, will mean much in Zimbabwe's agricultural future. The country will come to depend on the generation of black commercial farmers that acquired land in a more conventional way. Sullivan