Zimbabwe is presenting itself as the new carbon frontier – the investment destination of choice, with huge areas of forest land to trade on international markets in exchange for carbon credits. But is this wise, will it work, and will it make any difference to the climate?
In September 2023 a $1.5 billion contract for 7.5m hectares of land in Zimbabwe – some 20% of the country’s land area – was signed with a little-known outfit, Blue Carbon, based in Dubai whose founder and chair Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al-Maktoum is a member of Dubai’s royal family. Similar contracts reputedly are being prepared with Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, Papua New Guinea, Bahamas and Dominica, along with maybe 40 other countries in the pipeline.
This came to light just before the global climate summit in Dubai, COP28, and supposedly showed how seriously the petrostate was taking the climate challenge. For others, it raised eyebrows and sparked concern.
The deal is supposed to be ratified under article 6.2 of the Paris climate agreement, whereby countries can make bilateral arrangements to offset carbon emissions under so-called ITMOs (Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes). Avoiding deforestation in another country then can be used to claim credits and to meet targets. Clearly Dubai has quite a lot to offset if it is to meet net zero targets, hence the huge area of land that is included.
Carbon offsetting in the spotlight
Carbon offsetting as a route to climate change mitigation has come under much critique, especially when linked to forest and land use deals. There are so many technical problems – is the baseline realistic, is deforestation really expected, will the trees that are not cut down actually sequester the amount of carbon expected….? And so on.
Studies of forest-based offset schemes have shown again and again that they do not deliver as expected. Indeed, a major investigation showed that over 90% of verified carbon projects were not achieving climate change mitigation claims as claimed. And this was through a previously well-respected verification agency, Verra, whose credibility was dashed (although they offered a riposte). There are unfortunately many, many more agencies in the ‘carbon cowboy’ trading market who are even less rigorous.
It is not just the technical claims of carbon offsetting that have been challenged, however. Commenting on carbon deals, and specifically the Blue Carbon agreements, the Financial Times noted that a new wave of land grabs was looming in Africa. How the Government of Zimbabwe thinks it can prevent use of currently unprotected forests over 20% of Zimbabwe’s land area is anyone’s guess, but attempts will be made to enclose, exclude and disenfranchise people from valuable resources in the desperate attempt to raise carbon funds. This is potentially green grabbing on a massive scale.
The collapse of a mega carbon project
This is not the first time that Zimbabwe has been at the centre of a large carbon project. The now infamous Kariba REDD+ project, established in 2011, works over 758,000 hectares, stretching from Binga through Hurungwe to Nyaminyami and Mbire. It is operated by a Harare-based company, Carbon Green, with a background in hunting and safaris in the Zambezi valley. It again was verified by Verra and backed by South Pole as consultants, and was expected to generate around 52 million carbon credits over the project lifetime.
A series of exposes on the project however have highlighted some major problems, with a long New Yorker profile projecting the case into the limelight. The project’s backers got cold feet, and Verra rescinded the verification, making the credits effectively worthless. South Pole then withdrew, leaving the project stranded, although some credits are apparently again being sold.
A decade ago, when the project was just getting going, Professor Vupenyu Dzingirai and Lindiwe Mangwanya of the University of Zimbabwe explored the project and its operations. The findings were published in a chapter of a book that I co-edited called Carbon Conflicts and Forest Landscapes in Africa, published in 2015.
Even back then, questions were raised. The assumed pattern of deforestation that was projected into the future as the expected impact without the project were hugely unrealistic; the baseline area did not make sense as it was not comparable; the impacts on local communities were likely to be large; the ‘alternative livelihoods’ projects to compensate were minimal and often inappropriate; and so on. All familiar themes in carbon projects across Africa, as we show through other chapters in the book from across the continent.
A decade on these lessons have not been learned. In 2014, the projects were starting up, and REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) was seen as a potential solution. When we started our project, we were agnostic, even if sceptical of some of the grand claims. Across eight projects from east, west and southern Africa, we expected some to offer some hope. Sadly, this didn’t materialise and, as we outlined in the book’s introduction, all had similar problems, ones that have been replicated again and again over the years since, and across the world.
A decade ago, the price of carbon was low, and the voluntary carbon market was small. This has changed dramatically, with high quality (whatever that is) ‘boutique’ credits trading at much higher prices than those offered a decade back, despite the hit resulting from newspaper exposes during 2023. The voluntary carbon market is now valued at around US$2 billion and growing fast, despite concerns about the ‘integrity’ of the offer.
Recognising the limits of this market and the problems of quality assurance – especially following the series of high-profile exposes and the effective collapse of big flagship projects like Kariba REDD+ – there have been a number of global initiatives emerging to shore up the market, aiming to increase the ‘integrity’ of both the supply and demand sides.
But you must ask if these efforts really will deal with the big problems of dodgy deals in this market, and whether expecting offset markets to address the pressing problem of carbon emissions is likely to have any real impact. Meanwhile, more stringent science-based targets are also being watered down.
No prospects for a happy ending
My agnosticism of a decade ago has disappeared. The experience of project after project shows that there are perennial problems with measurement, verification and claims of ‘permanence’, ‘additionality’, and so actually achieving climate mitigation while improve forest-based livelihoods (just search through the database on the REDD Monitor website for a flavour of the sorry tale).
Despite well-meaning voluntary regulation and standard setting, this is largely not having an impact in the field of forest/land-use offset schemes. Even previously well-respected agencies like Verra have been found wanting, let alone the safeguards for mega ITMO projects like the Blue Carbon deals.
It’s a wild-west market where everyone thinks that they can make a quick buck, and there are plenty of claims made that have little value. With African leaders entering the fray offering huge areas of national asset on such markets, the prospects for a happy ending – both for local people and the climate – look far off.
In the last week, Zimbabwe, following both Malawi and Zambia, has declared a drought emergency, requesting US$2 billion in support for purchasing food supplies in the face of large predicted deficits. The total cereal harvest is expected to be around one million tonnes, about half amount of the previous year, leaving a big gap to meet total demand, meaning that cereal imports will be essential.
We have known that this was going to be an El Niño season for many months. There were early warnings, recommendations to plant drought resistant crops, suggestions to plan for the worst. And, unlike many climate predictions where there are more uncertainties, the impacts are well documented, with close correlations between El Niño events and maize outputs repeatedly seen. The consequences are now being felt all over the region.
El Niño events are not new. The major droughts of 1982-83, 1991-92, 2009-10, 2015-16 among others were all linked to El Niño. El Niño is a naturally-occurring phenomenon and emerges when surface temperatures in parts of the Pacific ocean increase. This has an impact on global circulation patterns and drought is usually experienced in southern Africa (while just to the north in east Africa El Niño years are unusually wet). Great droughts in the past have been retrospectively linked to similar climate anomalies back into the nineteenth century, although today’s accelerating climate change makes things worse.
Food insecurity is widespread
This year, through a very uneven season, farmers have tried and tried to get a crop. I don’t know how many Western Union transfers I’ve done to pay for yet another round of seed after the last one failed due to another extended mid-season drought. Cropping results are patchy, depending on luck, timing and local micro-climatic conditions. Those with access to riverbank or vlei gardens or a small irrigation pumpset will fare better. This is a year whenpfumvudza (no-till farming in pits) should have come into its own, with moisture conserved even if rainfall was minimal. But this again was not guaranteed, and many dug and dug to no avail.
All this is having a huge impact on food security and the World Food Programme reckons there are currently 2.7 million Zimbabweans in need of food, with many more expected in the coming months. The tobacco crop, essential for the incomes of many smallholder farmers these days, has been hard hit too with quality down and sales volumes depressed.
Like El Niño years before, this is going to be a tough period, as the predictions from FEWS NET starkly show. Luckily the previous years have seen relatively good harvests and many have stores of food to help tide them over, especially in the resettlement areas, but nevertheless many will be reliant on assistance. Most of this food will come from relatives who have food or funds, but government, private sector and international aid support will be important too.
Poor media reporting
The media reporting on the drought is once again disappointing. This El Niño event is being experienced all across the region; it is not just a Zimbabwe story. El Niño is a particular, long-established weather event that may become more severe with climate change, but it isn’t climate change per se, as so often suggested. The tired story that since land reform Zimbabwe has imported food each year as we know is simply not true, despite the claims of too many poorly researched articles (see these examples among many from Reuters and VoA). The capacity to cope this year has been improved by land reform, and much of the food being redistributed now to communal areas is coming from resettlement farms.
A much more interesting media story would be how people are managing in spite of the drought; what new networks are being formed to support the needy; and what is the role of social mobilisation across urban and rural divides to respond. But these are not storylines for making cheap political points.
Sadly, the quality of rural reporting (and most Twitter/X commentary) in Zimbabwe (with some notably exceptions) is poor, with limited understanding of changing rural dynamics and little attempt to find out what is really happening. It is eternally frustrating, which is why I am happy some of these Zimbabweland blogs find their way into local newspapers and websites.
Droughts are always political
The media commentaries emphasise once again that droughts are always political. Whether it is the government or international agencies, everyone wants to make a point (and raise money) from a drought. As P. Sainath argued long ago in relation to India, ‘everybody loves a good drought’.
While rainfall deficits and global weather events take their toll, drought impacts are mediated through economic, social and political relations. There is of course no such thing as a natural disaster, as vulnerabilities always emerge from particular contexts. And in Zimbabwe the context is not conducive – economic collapse, tampering with currencies, political turmoil and more make it especially difficult for people to respond.
The smallholder farmers who got land during the land reform are partially insulated from the wider problems, and having land to self-provision from, even if yields are low, is vital in generating resilience. The significant investment in small-scale irrigation in these areas is especially important and will be a major factor in improving food supplies this year.
As we’ve documented before, it is the land reform farmers, especially in the A1 areas, who export food and support others, both in communal areas and in towns. The new food economy, particularly in drought periods remains poorly understood, certainly by journalists but also by those in government and the international agencies. Let’s hope that, like in previous years, the predicted disaster will not be as bad as feared.
The political debates about the rights and wrongs of Zimbabwe’s land reform continue to occupy many. The tired, old obsession about how the land was taken and the associated focus on so-called ‘cronies’ persists, despite much evidence to suggest that the process was highly varied and that most land was occupied by land poor peasants and unemployed people from town, even if some high value land was captured by political elites. A failure to grasp the complexity of land politics in Zimbabwe plagues policy debates, and the myths that we thought we had challenged in our book 14 years ago frustratingly still rear their head in discussions with donor officials, diplomats, journalists, foreign academics and many others.
Understanding the political implications of the land reform is important, as the articles profiled in this fifth and final blog in the series on new literature on Zimbabwe’s land reform show. For many, the land reform was popular, even if everyone acknowledges the benefits were unevenly shared. The ruling party knows this and continues to deploy land and liberation rhetoric during election periods. Even the opposition parties agree that land reform is a done deal. But what in-depth research can reveal is how the politics of land plays out in both the countryside and in peri-urban areas where land reform occurred and how the dynamics of accumulation, differentiation and elite capture results in new interests and political alliances.
Along with many others, we have written quite a bit about this, whether in relation to the politics of A2 farms or the regional politics of the countryside in the lowveld (see the section in our online book of articles). What is clear that the dynamics of land invasions, the patterns of subsequent social differentiation and the political mix that emerges is highly varied across the country (including between different rural and (peri-)urban areas) and has changed over time.
Changing land politics in the Second Republic
The processes of accumulation and their political drivers have changed significantly over the last 24 years. After the relative continuity of the Mugabe years, it was the ‘coup’ that installed Emmerson Mnangagwa that brought in some significant changes. The rhetoric of Zimbabwe being ‘open for business’ hailed a much more explicit commitment to neoliberal style economic policy aimed at encouraging investment and facilitating entrepreneurship.
The politics of the so-called Second Republic under Mnangagwa is discussed in an edited book edited by Gorden Moyo and Kirk Helliker. This is a companion volume to Grasian Mkodzongi’s excellent edited book, The Future of Zimbabwe’s Agarian Sector, which again looks at the post Mnangagwa era focusing in on agrarian issues (including our chapter on the politics of A2 farms). Both books signal the important changes that have unfolded since 2017, making the agrarian dynamic in land reform areas even more complex. While only touched on briefly in these books, the post-2017 period has also been marked by a continued collapse of the economy and a massively expanded scale of corruption. While present before, the corruption that Thomas Mapfumo complained about in his 1989 release is vast, reaching throughout the economy and across the state with major implications for land politics, and wider livelihood opportunities. The cabinet minister, Maurice Nyagumbo, who took his own life in 1989 because he was ashamed of being linked to the Willowgate scandal involving the illegal sale of government vehicles on the black market, would be truly appalled.
Accumulation from above and below
In his paper in the Journal of Southern African Studies – Social Differentiation and ‘Accumulation from Above’ in Zimbabwe’s Politicised Agrarian Landscape, Phillan Zamchiya extrapolates his very interesting and thorough field studies from Chipinge to make a wider case about how land reform is a process of ‘accumulation from above’. He argues that much work (including our own and that of the Sam Moyo African Institute of Agrarian Studies) offers only a ‘materialist explanation’ of social differentiation, centred on an analysis of class dynamics, while not paying close enough attention to the role of wider state practices and political processes involved in shaping accumulation dynamics in highly politicised agrarian landscapes. Making use of the late Alex Magaisa’s database on farm mechanisation, he argues that there was significant capture by ruling party elites in a process of extended patronage including cabinet ministers, judges, members of the security sector, civil servants, national election administrators and traditional leaders. Noone denies that this happened (the government data show it), but much field-based data shows that the extent of such patronage was quite contained. Most land reform beneficiaries saw none of these benefits, just as has been the case with command agriculture. This well documented pattern – in our sites in Masvingo only 1% of households received anything from the scheme – makes this critique somewhat puzzling.
As Mahmood Mamdani argued long ago (and by Ben Cousins more recently), processes of accumulation from above and below work in tandem. The task of the analyst is to tease out how they intersect and influence the outcomes over time. In some cases it may be that elite patronage dominated (and perhaps this was so in the Chipinge case study as it did not involve a land invasion involving a diverse array of people), but in other cases (and certainly all ours, even in the high potential area of Mvurwi) the dynamic of accumulation from below is the main story, certainly in all A1 cases and even most A2 ones too (although these have been less successful). Inevitably there have been successes and failures of land reform, each with political consequences.
Land contests in peri-urban spaces
As readers of this blog will know, our work has concentrated on rural areas across the country, but land politics is especially hot in urban areas, as earlier blogs have discussed. A number of new papers focus on these processes. For example, Aaron Rwodzi argues in an article in the Southern Journal for Contemporary History – Land Resettlement and Elite Monopoly in Peri-urban Harare: The Colonial Legacy of Land Ownership in Post-colonial Zimbabwe, 2000-2019 – that in the case of urban Harare “instead of land being distributed to the deserving poor peasants, farmers and the vulnerable, land barons emerged from the ruling elite, business tycoons and war veterans who allocated to themselves land and multiple farms”. This had important echoes of what happened during the colonial land distribution process. The lack of political accountability of such land barons and their patrons meant that a politically powerful group could emerge in these urban areas following land reform, both restricting access to land and exerting (party) political control. Jo McGregor and Kudzai Chatiza offer an important analysis of why such patronage dynamics, firmly linked to ruling party power, emerge in peri-urban spaces. Again taking the case of Harare in the book chapter, The Politics of Harareʼs Periphery, they show how the emergence of a strong opposition politics in Zimbabwe’s urban areas resulted in a strategy by the ruling party to impose control over the peri-urban areas, and particularly through land.
This pattern of political control is also observed by Johannes Bhanye, Ruvimbo Hazel Shayamunda, Rumbidzai Irene Mpahlo, Abraham Matamanda and Lameck Kachena in their Land Use Policy paper, Land politics and settlers’ responses to land tenure under threat in emerging peri-urban spaces in Zimbabwe. Based on a case study from Caledonia peri-urban settlement east of Harare, the paper focuses on the lived experiences of vulnerable peri-urban settlers, documenting the struggles against land grabbing by influential elites and attempts at regulation by local authorities. Unlike the other studies that focus on the practices of land barons and the role of the ruling party, this paper is more grounded in the actual practices of local residents. They argue for a perspective on ‘insurgent citizenship’, which “challenges the notion of passive vulnerability among poor urbanites or settlers”, as they are able to develop ways to protect their land including developing political alliances, pursuing legal action, carrying out civil disobedience and invoking religious symbolism to safeguard their land rights. The paper reveals novel forms of power in these urban spaces, emerging through the agency of residents defending their land.
No single story
Some researchers persist in claiming that the process of land reform was one that was driven only by political patronage. But these claims either emerge from a political stance that rejects the land reform outright or through the selective interpretation of particular case studies – or some combination of the two. As much research has shown, there is of course no single story of land reform in Zimbabwe. Different places – across rural areas, between rural and urban – have different dynamics. The tension between the agency of farmers or urban residents and the impositions of the state and elites interplays in shaping land politics. There are processes of both accumulation from below and above, but unravelling how this happens, to whom and where is the key task for analysts, rather than confidently asserting one storyline that fits a particular political position.
This is why research on Zimbabwe’s land reform remains so important, and why debates over interpretations of different cases, rooted in different methodological assumptions, are always essential. This is also why working on Zimbabwe’s ongoing post land reform story remains so exciting, and why this annual review of available literature is so enriching.
This is the last blog in this year’s compilation of new literature. I’m sure I’ve missed some so please send publications to me or link to them in a comment to a blog in the series. Let’s hope that the collective effort around researching Zimbabwe’s land reform will continue to illuminate and inform.
This is the fourth blog in a series summarising new research on Zimbabwe’s land reform. In this blog, I look at newly published material on agricultural commercialisation and the shifting political economy of command politics and capitalist expansion.
The land reform from 2000 overturned the old dualist system of large-scale (largely white) commercial agriculture and small-scale communal area systems, creating a trimodal agrarian structure, with resettlement farms being larger than communal area plots and smaller than most former commercial farms. As Tom Tom describes in his review – From Bimodal to Trimodal Agrarian Transformation: Agrarian Changes in Zimbabwe’s New Resettlement Areas Two Decades – this transformation resulted in not only redistribution of land and changes in tenure regimes but also “the sociocultural, economic, and political texture of the hitherto predominantly white-owned large-scale farms.” The chapter looks at a whole host of themes but highlights in particular the emergence of new forms of agricultural production relation, notably land leasing, joint ventures, sharecropping and contract farming linked to processes of agricultural investment, commercialisation and mechanisation. The trajectories of accumulation that this results in creates divergent and highly complex outcomes affected by the type of crop, the form of commercial contract, the role of state support and factors such as climate change, as the papers reviewed below show.
Crop contracting driving commercialisation
Several new papers focus on both sugar and tobacco as commercial crops driving this pattern of commercialisation, particularly via contract arrangements. The role of external capital in the form of large investors and processors is key in both facilitating and constraining the possibilities of accumulation on land reform farms. Freedom Mazwi and Walter Chambati in their paper in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies – Diversification of sugar production in Zimbabwe: wealth accumulation from below by outgrowers – highlights how over 1000 black sugar outgrowers who received land through land reform have accumulated – supporting processes of farm mechanisation – while being reliant on the support of transnational capital. The study extends earlier research by ourselves and Mazwi on the success of outgrower sugar production, despite the assumption that it would never work. Nevertheless despite this ‘accumulation from below’, contract relations with sugar companies remain exploitative through monopolistic pricing of inputs and outputs, resulting in significant rents accruing to transnational capital. While the new producers could not do without the companies who finance inputs, labour and provide water and a guaranteed market, companies’ ability to extract profits acts to “slow down the pace of accumulation”.
Focusing in on Mkwasine sugar estate in the southeast lowveld, Francis Muromo and Paramu Mafongoya, the paper in the journal Global Research in Environment and Sustainability, Emerging Dynamics in Mkwasine Sugar Estate after the Land Reform in Zimbabwe, highlights howreconfigured land ownership structures and tenure regimes has resulted in significant tensions and conflicts between the new farmers (400 settlers each on 10-20 hectares of irrigated land each) and the estate, owned by Tongaat Hullet Group and between farmers themselves. A move from a centralised estate managed by a single company to a complex contracting arrangement increases transactions costs and can result in conflicts over allocation of resources, irrigated water flows and most notably market prices offered. Under the new post-land reform arrangements, new governance arrangements are needed, including mechanisms for conflict negotiation and resolution.
State support: the role of ‘command agriculture’
In an attempt to boost staple crop production (maize in particular) the state adopted the ‘command agriculture’ approach. This was a form of contract farming, involving the supply of soft loans to farmers with large farms and (usually) irrigation infrastructure. As Freedom Mazwi and Paris Yeros argue in a paper in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, the constraints on capital and wider finance in Zimbabwe’s sanctioned economy and the focus of investment under neoliberalism on export crops such as sugar and tobacco, led to underinvestment in staple food crops, undermining national food security. The article titled ‘Zimbabwe’s Command Agriculture: Problems of Planning Under Neoliberalism’, highlights the potentials of state planning to offset the biases of neoliberalism, and the policies foisted on African countries by the likes of the World Bank.
Somewhat controversially, the study contends that there is a “a distinct correlation between national food self-sufficiency and, to some extent, economic stability and growth under state intervention and planning.” State-led stimulus and planning initiatives can, they suggest, result in boosts in “economic growth and development if well managed.” The proviso that such efforts must be well managed is crucial as much evidence, including some shared in the paper showed that political patronage and corruption influenced and, in the end, undermined the command agriculture programme. However, the article offers a more positive conclusion, recalling earlier state-building efforts around land and food arguing that “state planning in cereal production poses a threat to neoliberalism and the hierarchical international food system, and is an important step toward attaining national sovereignty.”
Clearly in attempts to commercialise agriculture following land reform, relying on contracting, joint ventures and so on driven by international and local capital is insufficient. Experiences of such efforts show that, while those involved in the contracting arrangements benefit, allowing some ‘accumulation from below’, there are limits to what is possible, as only some crops are suitable for contracting and inevitably contract arrangements reflect power imbalances allowing often external capital to benefit at the expense of local farmers. Addressing such inequities and the lack of finance for other crops, the role of the state is crucial, as has long been argued in debates about agricultural development, from the Asian Green Revolution onwards. A well-targeted, subsidised loan investment can help get things moving, allowing capital poor farmers to produce for the nation. The challenge in the Zimbabwe case is how to facilitate this without extensive rent-seeking by those involved. In this respect, while the principle of command agriculture has a clear logic, especially in Zimbabwe’s siege economy, the practice has often been less than ideal.
Climate change: towards resilient forms of agricultural commercialisation
Climate change is another factor that can upset successful pathways to commercial agriculture, particularly in smallholder settings that are especially vulnerable to rainfall variability induced by climate change. In a paper in Climate and Development, Andrew Newsham, Lars Otto Naess, Khamaldin Mutabazi, Toendepi Shonhe, Gideon Boniface and Tsitsidzashe Bvute explore the climate resilience of different agricultural commercialisation pathways in both Zimbabwe and Tanzania.
Through highlighting the underlying causes of uneven distributions of vulnerability and resilience, the research finds that those who are most vulnerable, and so would benefit from boosts in agricultural incomes through commercialisation, are least able to adapt to climate change and develop resilient systems. This they refer to as the ‘adaptation trap’, suggesting the need for tailored approach to so-called climate-smart agriculture that takes account of differential patterns of vulnerability (and so class, gender and age differentiation) to climate change, as well as the potential for commercialisation.
Pathways to commercial agriculture
Land reform disrupted the core white-owned commercial agricultural sector through land redistribution. The expectation was that by distributing land to a diversity of producers – operating on small, medium and large scales – a new form of commercial agriculture, able to generate surpluses and drive accumulation from the agricultural sector for a greater number of people, would arise.
While there have been (for many) unexpected successes with tobacco and sugar, driven through contracting with smallholder land reform beneficiaries, the commercialisation of other crops has not been so vibrant. This is largely because of lack of finance in the cash constrained economy, which has been subject to mismanagement, corruption and sanctions for now over two decades. In order to revive agriculture as a core sector, policy has focused on a business-oriented, commercial drive for agriculture in recently years. After 2017, President Mnangagwa’s regime has encouraged investment and the liberalisation of joint venture and land leasing arrangements.
As a result, there has been a growth of new forms of arrangement facilitating agricultural investment and commercialisation. As our research has shown, this has happened in A1 areas, but particularly occurs in the A2 medium-scale farms, which had suffered years of under-investment. Patterns of consolidation and a growing land market (for both notional (illegal) purchase and leasing) has resulted in shifts in agrarian relations, and some argue a reversal in the gains of the reform. The varied role of external contract, state subsidy, patronage and climate change shapes the diverse pathways to commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe as this newly published research shows.
This is the third in a short blog series on Zimbabwe research published recently. The theme of belonging and identity in the post-land reform setting has attracted a lot of research attention recently. As a whole suite of papers published in 2022 showed, negotiating belonging in a complex, fast-changing political landscape is not straightforward.
In 2000 or thereabouts people moved onto land from communal areas and towns to land that they often had no previous association with. Farm workers who joined the land invasions may have worked on the land and lived there sometimes for generations, but it was definitively not theirs. Many claimed ancestral connections to the land, given the existence of grave sites and chiefs and headmen competed with different narratives about who ‘owned’ the land. As resettlement farms became ‘home’ – where people lived and died and were often buried – then associations with the land changed, but the mix of people who came on land reform to the A1 resettlement farms meant that the process of creating communities and a sense of belonging was a process, one that continues to this day.
As reported on this blog before, Walter Chambati and Freedom Mazwi published a great paper in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy in in 2022, which delves into these themes. Just as the important book – Livelihoods of Ethnic Minorities in Rural Zimbabwe– also reviewed last year, Chambati and Mazwi’s paper titled “The Land Belongs to Us”: Ethnic Claims Over Land During Zimbabwe’s Land Reforms explores how ethnicity – and what they call ethno-regionalism – intersects with class, political party affiliation, gender, citizenship, and generation. They argue that “ethno-regionalism was inevitable in the small-scale A1 farms, since it mainly resettled peasants near their communal areas of origin. However, in the small capitalist A2 farms, ethnic tensions were perceived through exclusions of the “insiders,” as they were edged out of the allocations by the urban middle classes seeking accumulation opportunities in the context of an economic crisis.” Such exclusions fuel ongoing grievances in certain areas, where demands for land from ‘indigenous’ people is seen to be marginalised by those connected to political elites, with either Zezuru (in the Mugabe era) or Karanga (in the Mnangagwa era) identities. The attempt to sideline ethnically based claims in Zimbabwe’s land reform (there is no provision for ‘restitution’ for example, unlike South Africa) may be undermined by an increasingly embedded ethno-regional politics.
A great paper by Malvern Marewo, Belonging and Agrarian Labour Exchanges in Zimbabwe: Navigating Between Communal Areas and Fast Track Villagised Settlements, published in Africa Spectrum looks at labour exchanges between A1 resettlement farmers and those in their communal areas of origin based on kinship and friendship ties. A case study from Mashonaland West shows that a sense of belonging is vital in labour exchanges and so enabling livelihoods. The article concludes that “belonging-based labour exchange enhances agricultural production and livelihoods in a new land ownership and economic circumstances.” Another paper by Marewo in the Journal of Southern African Studies explores other connections of ‘belonging’ between A1 farms and communal areas. These remain important, although in our sites they are on the wane given the span of time since settlement. Even burials are now occurring much more frequently in the resettlement areas. However, despite changes, more than 20 years after land reform these relations, connections and networks are central to sustaining the very social basis of production and livelihoods in the resettlements. Far from the idea of the resettlements being separated from ‘traditional’ systems, and so becoming ‘modern’ and ‘productive’ according to a technical frame, long run social ties based on extended kin networks are important, and the links between the communal and resettlement areas remain strong.
An ethnically identified, racial sense of belonging to the land of course continues to influence policy debates that plague the post-land reform period. Claims of compensation by former white farmers still have not been resolved, as political disputes persist about who are the rightful ‘owners’ of the land in the context of a liberation struggle and decolonisation process. Racially inflected assumptions abound, whether around who are the ‘successful’ farmers and what ‘farming’ should look like in contemporary Zimbabwe (often by implication of white colonial styles of farming) and who is ‘indigenous’ and so has rights to land and commitment to the nation. As an intriguing paper by Ntina Tzouvala – Invested in Whiteness: Zimbabwe, the von Pezold Arbitration, and the Question of Race in International Lawon the famous case centred on the appropriation of land in the Forrester estate in Mvurwi. This investment was protected by a Bilateral Investment Treaty (a so-called BIPPA arrangement) and the case, the paper suggests, highlights how some of the assumptions of international law assume particular versions of racialised ownership and claims, allowing “the arbitrators to artificially separate the question of race/ism from questions of property and wealth distribution, capitalist accumulation, and exploitation.” A focus on racially defined property relations is a reflection of (neo)liberal domestic and international legal systems”, which acts to make “racial capitalism as a structure of dispossession, exploitation and abandonment” invisible.
Race, ethnicity and constructions of identity have a huge influence on narratives of land ownership and senses of belonging to the land. In the context of Zimbabwe, the legacy of settler colonialism means that debates about land and race are never far away. While Mugabe’s post-Independent Zimbabwe initially strived to create a unified nation, inclusive of all ethnic identifications, the land reform caused divisions as forms of politicised ethno-regionalism and claims of racial discrimination in land appropriation held sway. Exacerbated by the framing of legal interventions and the ethnicization of political patronage systems in Zimbabwe, these themes are increasingly surfaced in today’s on-going struggles over land.
This is the second in a short series of blogs reviewing recent literature on Zimbabwe’s land reform. The theme of gender and generation is a crucial one. Land reform changed gender relations as women gained access to land, sometimes in their own right. Old patriarchal relations typical of the communal areas were in some instances overturned as women gained opportunities as a result of land reform. This is not to say that the new scenario was truly equitable, as men have dominated certain areas of production – notably cash crops and large livestock – and very often control marketing, and so income flows to a household.
With men increasingly at home due to the decline in off-farm employment opportunities that once saw men moving to jobs in towns, mines or large-scale farms for periods of their lives. This old pattern of circular migration saw women take charge of the rural home as well as agricultural production. While migration has not ceased, a different pattern is seen and husbands and sons are more frequently around at home on the resettlement farms engaging in farming. With larger land areas, this requires a different type of farming to that seen in the communal areas, and for many households a more collaborative style of farming has emerged, involving both men and women and across generations.
Gendered impacts of land reform
A study by Clement Chipenda published in Goromonzi and Zvimba districts looked at agrarian labour and social reproduction outcomes for both A1 and A2 farmers in land reform areas. The paper published in the International Journal of Community Well-Being shows how land reform “facilitated the creation of employment opportunities, enhanced the productive and reproductive capacities of land reform beneficiaries, enabled wealth distribution and improved rural livelihoods”. However, because of the lack of resolution of Zimbabwe’s agrarian challenges due to on-going sanctions and the persistence of neoliberal context, there remains what they call “super-exploitation of labour”, which is reminiscent of the settler colonial era, meaning that much has not changed, especially for women and the more marginalised settlers. However, the field data from interviews with around 200 households shows how overall, “redistributive land reform has contributed to socio-economic transformation and enhanced citizens’ welfare and wellbeing”.
This does not necessarily translate into indicators of improved nutrition, as Kingstone Mujeyi and Jackqeline Mutambara show in a paper in Social Science and Humanities Open. Despite expectations that land reform would deliver improved nutritional outcomes as a result of greater access to land, more production and so greater amounts and diversities of food, data from a large survey show that women beneficiaries of land reform do not show improved nutritional status compared to communal area counterparts, even if dietary diversity is slightly higher. The article argues that this is down to poor education, lack of extension and limited networking to share information.
I wonder though if this is the full story, as women – whether in communal or land reform settings – know perfectly well how to improve their nutrition. This pattern was seen in the 1980s resettlement areas studied by Bill Kinsey and colleagues, where they suggested that larger households in resettlement areas meant that even with more food and income, it had to be shared with more people result in no net gains per person, and sometimes declines as the ‘magnet effect’ of land reform operated. We have seen a similar dynamic in our study areas, and this may be reflected in the national data reported here. Another intriguing hypothesis is that outcomes are more to do with sanitation and the ’shit factor’ than available food, as poor sanitation results in food not being effectively assimilated, resulting in declines in nutritional indicators. With the lack of basic infrastructure support (notably the building of pit latrines and the supply of boreholes and piped water) in the resettlement areas due to government neglect and the absence of aid agency/NGO projects due to sanctions, those living in land reform areas often have poor water and sanitation conditions compared to communal areas, which benefited from the hey-day of rural development in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Outcomes of land reform are of course highly varied – across time, between places and in relation to different categories of people. Former farmworkers, now often living within land reform areas but without significant areas of land for farming and no stable work, are a group who have often lost out from land reform, despite impressive, innovative adaptation to the new context. As Tom Tom and Resina Banda show in a fascinating paper in Feminist Africa, how female former farm workers have often suffered following land reform. As they note, a focus on women in the former farm worker populations has been absent from the literature, but they very often rely on precarious livelihoods, resulting in poverty, inequality, and marginalisation. Based on on-going work in Zvimba district in Mashonaland West province, the study highlights the variegated impacts of land reform on social protection and social reproduction for women. Despite successfully following diverse livelihoods have more agency than in their previous roles as dependent workers on large-scale workers, many are materially worse off than before, with major challenges for social reproduction and the ability to survive shocks to livelihoods. This is because of lack of policy attention to this group and the persistent gender hierarchies in (former) farm worker communities.
Generational questions: how can young people benefit from land reform?
In a book chapter called The Youth and Land Access Challenges: Critical Reflections from Post-Fast Track Land Reform Zimbabwe, Clement Chipenda and Tom Tom offer a useful overview of the generational questions emerging following land reform. 24 years after land reform, there is a new generation of children of settlers demanding land and seeking livelihoods and, as our research has shown, this presents many challenges. How can young people be accommodated on the land allocated to their parents? What forms of investment are required to generate livelihoods for the next generation? What social, political and economic relations emerge that transform the land reform areas one generation on? Based on extensive research particularly in Goromonzi and Zvimba districts, the chapter explores many of these questions. Formal access to land for young people is highly constrained as new allocations usually rely on local patronage networks, which they are not part of. Access to ‘political capital’ was seen as essential by youth informants in focus groups. As a consequence, most sought land through informal means, either through subdivisions or land sharing with parents or via land lease arrangements with settlers or through gaining access to small patches of land near rivers or dams that could be irrigated. Without formal rights to land in either case, young people have limited security presenting problems for the longer term as land reform areas transform across generations.
Vusilizwe Thebe and Elizabeth Shawa-Mangani in a paper in the Journal of Asian and African Studies show how youth land occupiers in Lupane district navigate a new livelihood following land invasions that started in 2012. Based on research in three villages over 10 years, the study shows how over time the land claimed was not necessarily used for farming as the sole sources of accumulation but as a base for the development of ‘worker-peasant’ livelihoods as the (now older) youth engaged in employment and combined off-farm work with small scale farming. A series of in-depth cases are at the core of the paper, highlighting how livelihoods are composed in an area where migrant labour has been central to the economy for a century. The struggle for land is, as the paper argues, intimately tied up with struggles over the wider economy, and in many places access to jobs is the crucial factor, even if having a secure rural base to call home is important. Land invasions as protests and demonstrations (as in the long tradition of madiro ‘freedom farming’ in Zimbabwe) provide a signal to the wider authorities. Unlike some policy narratives that land and agriculture will be a saviour for youth unemployment and discontent, this article highlights that the story is more complex and complex on and off farm livelihoods, including migration, will always be part of young people’s livelihoods in places like Lupane.
Negotiating land reform opportunities
The themes of gender and generation are essential in understanding the changing patterns of social reproduction in land reform areas, as these articles and chapters show. While land reform opened up opportunities for some, others – such as young people or farm workers who were not allocated land during the fast-track reform phase – must negotiate the complex social and political landscape of land reform areas to gain access to land and make a livelihood.
At the beginning of each year, I try and catch up on the ever-growing literature on land, agriculture and rural change in Zimbabwe. Each year there seems to be more and more, as the body of work grows based on many research studies, often linked to Masters’ and PhD projects by Zimbabwean students. It is an impressive testament to the depth and extent of scholarship associated with Zimbabwe, making it an on-going privilege for me to continue to contribute to, and hopefully support, this work. Given the volume of material, this year I have had to divide my review into five separate themes. The short blog series over the next five weeks offers a brief overview of material produced during (mostly) 2023, with links to the articles, chapters or books.
The first theme is livelihood change after land reform, one that has been central to the work of our team over many years. More and more case studies are being published that show both the continuities between sites, but also some of the important variations. For example, the paper by Tanaka Maimba and Vusi Thebe, “Changing Livelihoods and New Opportunities: Experiences of Resettled Farmers in Two Farms in Shamva District, Mashonaland Central Province, Zimbabwe” in the Journal of Land and Rural Studies shows once again that the majority of those on the land have benefited, building assets and improving livelihoods. If anyone continues to doubt the benefits of Zimbabwe’s land reform given the accumulated evidence, then I wonder. The paper also points out though that there are limitations, and the lack of post land reform government support is clearly hampering local initiatives.
The particular experience of borderland communities – in Kariba, the southeast lowveld, Manicaland and Matabeleland South among other sites – is explored in the edited collection – Lived Experiences of Borderland Communities in Zimbabwe. Livelihoods, Conservation, War and Covid-19. This book was edited by Nedson Pophiwa, Joshua Matanzima and Kirk Helliker and is the seventh in a remarkable series emerging from the Unit of Zimbabwean Studies in the Department of Sociology at Rhodes University. The 12 chapters illuminate how borders are always porous, connecting people and markets in ways that have been essential for many struggling to survive in a collapsing economy. The practices of those who live on the borders highlight how lines on a map become irrelevant when lives and livelihoods straddle geographies. As the introduction notes, “viewing the nation-state ‘from the margins’ offers fresh perspectives on Zimbabwean history and society”.
Integrating small-scale and artisanal mining within rural livelihood systems
An important strand of work complements the studies of land-based agricultural livelihoods after land reform and focuses on the intersections of farming and artisanal mining. The work of Grasian Mkodzongi is especially important in this regard. In his latest paper in the Journal of Rural Studies, he offers a review of this work, focusing on gold mining. This shows clearly how the growth of small-scale mining has generated incomes and employment for poor urban and rural people alike. Integrating with land reform processes across the Great Dyke region of the country, where much land redistribution took place is an important dynamic. Yet the informal nature of artisanal mining means that it is dangerous, subject to corrupt practices and overall poorly regulated, and often dismissed by the state who prefer large-scale operations. The article makes the case that a more appropriate policy framework is needed that allows the potentials of small-scale mining to be realised.
In a recent edited book, The Lives of Extraction. Identities, Communities and the Politics of Place, Joseph Mujere takes a look at chromite mining and the role of cooperatives as a route to articulating with larger mining firms, including now many Chinese ones. The brokered relationships between small-scale operations and those who are able to provide capital, machinery and so on is changing the nature of the mining sector. In the study area in Mapanzure multiple Chinese companies are operating with a whole array of often informal contracting arrangements. This has implications for how resources are used, what regulations are applied and who benefits from mining. As mining becomes an increasingly important part of rural livelihoods, beyond the old dynamic of men going to work in large, corporate mines, these types of commercial and political arrangements become important to understand.
COVID-19: transforming rural livelihoods
As our work during the COVID-19 pandemic showed, the lockdowns were deeply resented by rural people as they undermined the ability to market agricultural produce. A similar story is told by Senzeni Ncube and Horman Chitonge in paper titled, Land-Based Livelihoods and the Covid-19 Challenge: Navigating the Social Capital-Social Distancing Tension on A1 Villages in Zimbabwe in the European Journal of Development Studies. The study based on research on a land reform farm in Bubi District, Matabeleland North Province shows how in A1 land reform farms, enforced social distancing undermined many of the core practices that sustain livelihoods in rural areas, which are all based on interpersonal contact and networking. Social capital, and so connections between people, is essential in production, marketing, and wider provisioning, and is core to the livelihood system.
Changing livelihoods following land reform: a complex picture
Studies of the changing livelihood dynamics following land reform remain vitally important. While the basic story that land reform benefited people (although differentially) and that these included many poor and un/underemployed people, the changing patterns over time and across places remain important to understand. Major shocks such as COVID-19, but also droughts, economic collapse and so on, have profound effects on who is able to make the most of land reform, while changing economic opportunities, such as through artisanal and small-scale mining, can dramatically shift the resource values and so use in an area. While our team continues to concentrate on various parts of Masvingo, Mvurwi and Matobo, having new research come out to compare and contrast with from across the country is really useful.
The previous three blogs have offered some insights into the different dynamics of financing agriculture in Zimbabwe – covering in turn loans/credit, remittances and savings clubs. What is clear is that financing for commercialising and intensifying small- and medium-scale agriculture, now existing particularly in the (not so) new resettlements, is woefully inadequate and this severely constrains investment and in turn wider agricultural growth and economic regeneration.
The lack of finance means that most people for most of the time rely on self-financing, and so flows of investment are subject to the vagaries of the weather and the changing demands for expenditure at a family level (notably for school fees). Self-financing is more possible in the new land reform areas where agricultural surpluses are more common, but this is not guaranteed. In highly differentiated rural societies, it is only those who already relatively rich and have the resources to generate surpluses who can reinvest profits.
As we have seen, external financing is limited, and the banking/formal loan system cannot meet demand and imposes impossible constraints for most. Where contracting for a particular crop is possible – notably tobacco – this too has its problems, as companies squeeze farmers who are dependent on their financial support. Some are able to draw on patronage networks to gain funding through government schemes, such as command agriculture, but this is a vanishingly small number overall, and concentrated in the A2 farms. Remittances are significant and may be channelled into lumpy investments – notably for irrigation – or into projects linked to sons and daughters, often in the diaspora. But remittances are not assured, as conditions change at migrant destinations, whether through COVID-19 restrictions, economic depression or xenophobic violence.
The politics of financing
As David Graeber pointed out debt structures social relations and politics, and has done for thousands of years. Financing that imposes debt, even as short-term contracting and loan arrangement, creates a politics of unequal relations and often dependency. The autonomy that farmers strive for, and what having access to land through land reform has provided, is therefore limited by social and political relations constructed around finance.
The banking system in Zimbabwe is incredibly conservative. Perhaps all bankers are, and lending without guarantees of return is of course foolhardy. However formal banking and loans systems have not moved with the times. In the past agricultural finance was central to the operation of (white) large-scale commercial agriculture. Self-financing was largely unheard of. Farmers were always in debt. A loan was forwarded at the beginning of the season, secured against the title deeds of the farm. This financed the cropping, as well as investments in equipment and so on, and money was paid back at the end of the season.
Close relationships with bank managers and farmers assured continued financing, even when it was difficult to repay, and there was considerable negotiated flexibility in financing. White commercial agriculture and the banks (also then largely white-owned) were intimately connected through social, political and commercial relationships. And in the colonial era white-owned commercial agriculture was heavily supported by the state, which offered large amounts of concessionary finance to farmers as well as infrastructure development on farms through the Intensive Conservation Areas, for example, that oversaw the building of dams, roads and more in the ‘European’ farming areas.
Following land reform, such relationships were disrupted. White farmers were in the most part displaced and although there were some banks under new ownership, they did not reconfigure their business model towards a small-holder farming sector. Bank operations were constrained by the lack of overall finance in the economy as it contracted due to a combination of economic mismanagement, rising national debt and sanctions that prevented (or at least dissuaded) international loan finance, private and public. With limited finance, loans to other sectors than agriculture always looked more favourable, and portfolios shifted.
Private banks have been loath to finance ‘new’ land reform farmers due to lack of collateral. With the removal of title deeds (or continued dispute around them) and the lack of viable 99-year lease arrangements, which had clauses in them that undermined the banks’ confidence, there has been little option even for medium-scale A2 farmers. For A1 farmers none of these options were even available. The lack of imagination in policy circles around tenure issues is striking. The assumption is that the only option is to return to what existed before, despite the context for farming having changed radically.
The reluctance of Zimbabwe’s banks to look at other loan options that have been widely used to support agriculture in many parts of the world is striking. Part of this is political and bound up in the resentments created amongst the white economic elite due to land reform, and the knock-on effects on international finance, including through donors. But it is also the failure of both government and the private sector to learn from elsewhere. Did Asia’s Green Revolution, driven by millions of small farms rely on title deeds and collateral guarantees? Of course not. Yet Zimbabwe seems stuck in the past, and the state has offered few alternatives, while the NGOs and donors stick to their micro-finance and savings projects in the communal areas that may provide some livelihood security, but certainly not wider investment and growth.
For the new farmers in the land reform areas, options are therefore highly constrained. They neither have the bank finance, nor the high level of subsidies offered to white commercial farming in the past, and most have had to go it alone, or with support from extortionate loan arrangements from financial agents, restrictive contracting arrangements or support through remittances. When people compare commercial agriculture of the past and the attempts to rebuild a commercial base for agriculture today, where investment is so urgently needed, this context must be borne in mind. That many have managed to build irrigation systems, buy tractors and develop intensive livestock projects, as discussed in previous blogs, is remarkable given the circumstances.
The state however is not completely absent. But rather than offering the conditions for broad-based financing for famers operating at multiple scales, state financing is too often a source patronage, clientelism and corruption. The command agriculture programme is an example of this. Wheat and maize surpluses from select farms with political-military connections comes at a cost. The surpluses are banked politically too, with proclamations in the state press of the benefits generated. But the economics of patronage systems shows very selective benefits and major opportunity costs, with funds diverted to narrow projects and not used for more broad-based growth objectives.
Everywhere, debt, finance and money in general is always political. It is the basis of control, and the centre of political tussles. In the case of Zimbabwe racially-inflected struggles over the land reform legacy poison the debate about financing options, restricti.ng options for the majority. Political patronage through loan/subsidy schemes favour some, but undermine others. Private financing always comes with strings attached, and the profits made by contracting companies are not widely shared, while contract relationships cause forms of bondage and dependency. And into the mix come often unscrupulous loan sharks or even perfectly respectable financing companies who exploit poor farmers yet have limited options in order to sustain their profits.
Financial bricolage
As the previous blogs in this series have shown, farmers across our sites engage in the practices of financial bricolage, cobbling together solutions from different sources. The middlemen and contractors so often reviled in popular accounts of financial systems can be important, but they have the upper hand. Combining small-scale loans, irregular remittances, accumulated savings from clubs and occasional windfalls from big harvests is part of this juggling that all farmers must engage in. Managing finance through bricolage requires navigating diverse sources and multiple demands. Investments are not guaranteed as other needs may arise – school fees, a death or illness in the family, the rebuilding of a herd of cattle due the impacts of disease (the disaster of January disease across our sites still reverberates) or the need to provide basic groceries in periods when harvests are limited by drought.
Accumulation from below is not straightforward (even accumulation from above through patronage can be fickle as political fortunes change). This means that plans for a farm have to be sequenced, but plans must always change. Social relations – with relatives, financial agents, state officials, politicians and others – must be cultivated and secured, otherwise finances may not be forthcoming. It’s an elaborate, taxing process, as our informants explained.
All this his would be difficult enough in a stable economy, but when the profits from a harvest are wiped out because the Grain Marketing Board pays in RTGS local currency and months late it is more than dispiriting. One of our informants said that a good harvest resulted in nothing because of this. Once receiving the money from the GMB she said she cried on the steps of the Victoria Hotel in Masvingo and was able to buy just two pairs of cheap curtains for the house, not the agricultural investments she had planned for her garden.
There must be a better way…. a final plea
There must be a better way that matches the current need. Current approaches are premised on an outdated vision of agriculture based on the old dualism that was overturned by land reform. NGOs and their aid donor supporters offer micro-scale solutions for largely subsistence operations in the communal areas. These are all perfectly legitimate – this is not an argument against women’s empowerment and chicken projects, as these have their place – but such aid investments are not focused on agriculture-based growth and investment. Meanwhile the commercial banks and the government hark on about large-scale, ‘modern’ agriculture, attempting to recreate what existed in the past.
But today the opportunities for sustained agricultural growth (and so food security, poverty reduction, empowerment, profit and investment, or whatever the preferred objective is) lies in the small- and medium-scale farms in the land reform areas (A1 and A2), both constrained in different ways by lack of finance. In order to build up agriculture, to make use of the crucial asset of land distributed during land reform, resettlement farmers need finance. Just as their privileged white predecessors did when they were encouraged to go into commercial agriculture and produce tobacco or maize or when war veterans from World War Two were settled by the colonial regime, including on the very farms that are part of our study areas today.
The sort of finance required is not large. Building a start-up irrigation system with a borehole, water storage and basic pumping to flexible pipes may cost a few thousand dollars, while upgrading with bigger pumps, expanded areas, greater storage, drip irrigation and more reliability through solar investments can also be co-financed from agricultural sales once the initial investment is secured and profits are generated. Mechanising a farm to reduce tillage costs or enhance processing capacities to add value to agricultural produce again need not cost a fortune. This does not mean buying big tractors and combine harvesters, but smaller more appropriate forms of mechanisation that are now become available as a previous blog series has discussed.
So where is the elusive US$5000 loan (even $1000)? It is nowhere to be seen – or only available under very restrictive conditions. This must be a priority for those who work on farm finance (and this doesn’t include me). There are many lessons across the globe to draw from and learning from these must be a priority. This blog series has therefore been a plea to those in government, amongst donors, in the NGOs, and in the private sector, including the banks, to innovate and reimagine the financing of agriculture for the contemporary situation. This means avoiding harking back to old, outdated models that will not work and to a vision of dualism in agriculture that ignores the vibrant new resettlement areas that show much, still unrealised, potential.
The previous two blogs have explored how people in rural settings get hold of money, either through loans/credit or from remittances, but making use of and managing money is a challenge, especially in a high-inflation economy and one with parallel exchange rates. Here, savings arrangements are important not only for managing external sources of money, but also making sure that small sources of income from agriculture can be aggregated to assist with investment, where larger amounts are needed.
Rotational savings: opportunities for investment
Rotational savings clubs have long been a feature of the rural economy. They have been encouraged by NGOs, churches and government alike, and often linked to ‘women’s empowerment’ programmes. The highest density of such clubs is found in the communal area sites in our study areas. This is where the NGOs congregate and the state is more present. These are also areas where significant surpluses from agriculture are rare, and it is necessary to aggregate through savings for any form of investment.
There are a variety of forms of such clubs, but the basic principle is that a group of people come together and pool funds on a rotational basis, often with an initial subscription and then a regular monthly payment with each member receiving a payment after a few months. From our discussions across our sites, joining fees range from US$10 to US$50 and regular monthly contributions are between US$1 and US$10, sometimes allowing ‘in-kind’ investment of say goats that are managed as part of the pool. Cash contributions are always in US dollars (or Rands) largely as a hedge against inflation, as the local currency loses value so quickly these days with high inflation and devaluation. Variations on this typical format include burial societies to facilitate funeral and burial expenses, beef committees to allow for purchase of meat, as well as others.
The amounts generated can then be invested in a variety of projects, sometimes facilitated by external players, with horticulture, goat and chicken production projects being especially popular. As noted in an earlier blog, the Ministry of Women’s affairs is active in mentoring women’s groups not only to get access to loan finance, but also in the creation of savings groups.
Trust relations amongst members is crucial to allow continuity of payment and avoid pilfering of funds. This is why groups tend to be small – around 5-10 members – and often based on close family or neighbourhood connections, including links to church congregations. Sometimes children with jobs outside the area can be involved, channelling remittance income through such mechanisms.
Savings challenges in a volatile economy
Most such savings groups do not generate a huge amount of money, and so do not drive the sort of investments we have seen linked to remittances for example (see the last blog). Access to funds for women, who make up the majority of members, may come from gardening or other agricultural activities. Men are also involved these days, as they too see the value of managing money through savings as important, avoiding the dangers of frittering away agricultural income on regular expenditures without getting the opportunity to invest.
Most such projects deliver enough to buy a goat or two, some broilers or some basic irrigation equipment, but rarely are enough to deliver the bigger financing required for major investments, whether a tractor, some cattle or a full irrigation system. These must await a big harvest, which may happen only irregularly, or a project focused investment through remittances, as discussed in the last blog.
As all our informants noted, there are many challenges to such arrangements. Some drop out as the costs are too high, and monthly payments cannot be kept up due to other demands on income. Inflation devalues the savings pool, even as is always the case if the contributions are in US dollars. If someone waits six months for the payout, the value may have depreciated considerably as prices continue to rise, and it becomes impossible to realise the planned investment.
Case studies of savings clubs
Nevertheless, such savings systems are important within rural settings where small contributions can add up. The following cases highlight a variety of arrangements.
Case 1. Mrs N in Matobo explained how she started with a group of five, a mix of men and women, all local. She was doing it with her kids involved, so they could start establishing homes and build assets on the farm, such as cattle. They did two rounds, but it dissolved. “I want to do it again now to raise money for seeds for the coming rainy season”, but it’s difficult to mobilise people… It only works if people trust each other. They should be from the same family or totem.”
Case 2. Mrs S from Matobo explained how she got finance from the Women’s Bank to start a broiler project. Training was supported by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and she attended several courses on managing savings, business management for projects and so on. The project was supported by Our Beautiful Home project, a local NGO, and training on broiler farming was on the Cunningham farm nearby. There was a US$10 joining fee followed by a dollar a month. This she said was incredibly useful in getting going.
Case 3. Again in Matobo, Mrs H helped organise a savings club initially with 12 members in 2017. They started by focusing on goats with a US$50 joining fee, but many could not keep up the required payments and the group contracted. They decided that goats were too expensive and so switched to broilers where smaller amounts were needed. With the smaller group of four (all women), they have been able to establish viable broiler projects through the savings scheme, which really got going after COVID-19 when markets open up again. Initially they all purchased 50 chicks from the scheme, but now they have 200, 150 and two with 100. Now the scheme no longer functions as the savings system has served its purpose of providing the start-up funds for the project. Today each batch of 150 realises about $200 profit, from selling birds at $7 each, so it’s self-sustaining. She explains, “I have bought several goats from this project, along with a deep freezer, and I am planning to get solar panels and a battery, so I can sell frozen when prices are high like around Christmas”.
Case 4. In Chatsworth area in Gutu, around seven local teachers initiated a savings club. They also offer a loan option both to members and outsiders, who are charged higher interest rates. Since many teachers also farm to supplement their salaries, savings are invested in expanding horticultural operations. A group of four agricultural extension workers in the area have copied their system, although don’t offer loans as this is seen as too risky. They are linked to a local horticultural irrigators association and again invest in their farms, which are essential complements to their meagre government salaries. Investments have included building on a stand in Chatsworth, buying cattle, poultry investments and upgrading irrigation systems.
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Managing money through savings in a volatile economy with high inflation and parallel currencies is not easy, and the failures of many such groups is understandable. Trust is crucial amongst members, emphasising the social nature of managing money outside the formal system. Despite the small amounts involved and the fragility of many arrangements, such systems remain an important part of local agricultural economies.
The flow of remittances to Zimbabwe is huge, with diaspora remittances from outside the country estimated at over US$1 billion per annum, or around 16% of total foreign exchange receipts. This comes from a large network in the diaspora, whether in the region (mostly South Africa) or further afield, including the UK. Remittances also flow internally within the country, from people working in town in government jobs or in businesses of different sorts. Flows of finance also come from off-farm work, including artisanal mining, which is very significant especially for younger men in some parts of the country.
However, remittance flows are subject to wider economic and political conditions, both internationally and within Zimbabwe. Despite many expecting a dip in international remittances during the COVID-19 pandemic as relatives were retrenched and economic conditions worsened in many parts of the world, they actually increased, crossing the US$1billion mark, as relatives abroad “rose to the occasion”. International remittances however are always uncertain. Xenophobic attacks on Zimbabweans in South Africa make many fear to go and others return. Meanwhile, new, restrictive immigration requirements in the UK, preventing families from being together, will put many off joining the flow of labour to support the UK’s health and care system. Within Zimbabwe, with the on-going economic crisis now persisting over 25 years, the option for paid work outside farming has contracted, and the possibilities of sending money to rural home areas has declined. Indeed, remittance flows have reversed in many instances, with farmers in the land reform areas supplying food to those in town or relatives in the communal areas, as discussed further below.
Remittances have long been part of the financing of agriculture in Zimbabwe. In the relatively stable economic conditions of 1980s, for example, around 65% of farm income was derived from remittances from all sources in the communal areas, with significant impacts on poverty reduction. The old pattern of migration to off-farm work in towns, on farms and in the mines established in the colonial era persisted. The ‘reserves’ (now communal areas) were areas where labour resided and could be contracted for periods in what was the core economy, controlled by the white racial minority. Following independence in 1980, this pattern persisted, but has changed dramatically since the late 1990s, when the old core economy declined due the effects of first structural adjustment and after 2000 due to land reform.
These changes resulted in the emergence of a new, largely informal economy centred on small-scale farms and micro-enterprises of different sorts, with the post-2000 resettlement areas at the core of a new rural economy. Women became more involved, as traders and small-scale entrepreneurs, as the reconfigured land use provided new opportunities, especially around the growth of local value chains and the small towns in former large-scale farming areas, as we’ve documented extensively on this blog. While the official statistics focused on what was the former formal economy showed collapse, any quick observation of what is going on shows that these depressing numbers ignore much vibrant economic activity across rural areas.
Although the demographic cycle of largely male migration to formal jobs resulting in remittances flowing to rural areas for investment – in the past mostly cattle – has changed, the remittance economy is still important as the headline statistics show. How does this work? What mechanisms are used for transfers? What investments result? These are the questions tackled in this blog.
The many uses of remittance income in rural areas
Remittances may be for small, regular requirements – groceries, school fees and so on – for emergencies – such as dealing with a pest or animal disease outbreak, paying for medical expenses or coping with drought. But crucially, in the absence of other forms of financing (see previous blog), remittances are also essential for lumpier investments. Today such investments are crucial for encouraging growth in the agricultural economy, and for moving agricultural production towards a more commercial orientation.
As we have observed across our sites, investment in irrigation is vital, as people intensify on smaller plots. Jojo water storage tanks, irrigation pumps, piping and so on are in high demand and can be seen in many farms across the country. Investments in machinery, including grinding mills, peanut butter processing equipment, transport, two-tonne trucks, pick-ups and so on is also crucial in the new agricultural economy, as a previous blog series has shown. All of these benefit both from the sales of agricultural surpluses and from remittances, in varying combinations depending on crop harvests and the connections of the household to remitting family members.
Remittance flows therefore follow a demographic cycle, with children growing up leaving the farm home and getting jobs at home and abroad. Not all are able or willing to remit but many do, keeping the link across generations between farms and a wider, increasingly global, network. We have been exploring the patterns of accumulation across our sites, and a clear pattern emerges with investment in education being financed often through agriculture, resulting in few surpluses for investment except in exceptional years, but educated kids will often be able to send money home later once they gain employment in later years, meaning parents can then invest in intensification, often to compensate for lack of family labour and to make farming more manageable in old age.
Migrants’ ‘projects’: cross-generational links to the farm
A particular pattern of contemporary remittances from those who have jobs elsewhere, especially abroad, is investment in ‘projects’. Across our sites we see a whole range of investments, including piggeries, fish farms, goat projects (especially improved breeds), beef cattle feeding/fattening, transport/marketing projects, broiler operations and irrigation plots for intensive horticulture, requiring boreholes, water storage, pumps and pipes. These projects are established on parents’ land reform farms where surplus land and water can be put to good use. Diaspora sons and daughters may employ labourers to take care of the projects, but their parents must provide overall management. Profits are used to support the family home, as well as school fees for younger siblings, medical and funeral expenses. Many diaspora children build houses and invest in all the mod-cons of town living, with solar electricity systems, flush toilets and the rest. Large TVs, nice sofas, sound systems and so on can be found in many people’s living rooms these days in houses with metal roofs, multiple rooms and fancy windows and doors.
As one of our informants commented, “the farms these days are like town. Solar, TVs, fridges. We invest in all this to lure our children home. We want them to come back and be involved in the farm.” At another farm in Masvingo district we were admiring the tall stands of irrigated maize and the considerable irrigation infrastructure around the homestead, including a new borehole, a water storage tank and drip irrigation in the field. Mrs M, a widow, explained that this was investment from her eldest son who after leaving college got jobs that allowed him to develop the farm. This is providing income for the whole family, including paying for school fees for the younger children. It is an impressive investment and, as Mrs M explains, she gets lots of visitors marvelling at the achievements. She is making significant profits now from the farm, but the start-up investment could not have happened without the remittances. She also points out that her son is keen on farming, and as he works locally comes often and is keen on taking over.
This connection through investments is thus important for intergenerational transfer, as well as current investment. Even though the farms of the future will look very different to the ones of today (more well equipped, mechanised and intensive), the key thing for today’s farmers is to get their children (boys usually, but also girls) to take over the farm when they become old or die.
Remittances are not guaranteed: migrants’ challenges
Of course, not everyone can get a well-paying job that allows for remittances home. In fact, the classic route of successful education leading to government jobs of the past no longer provides sufficient resources, as teachers, nurses, extension workers, clerks, even higher-level civil servants, get a salary that is barely sufficient for survival let alone providing surpluses to remit. Going abroad is no longer a certain route to surplus income either. The care jobs that many Zimbabweans end up in in the UK, for example, are low paid and, without wider support networks, diaspora families frequently struggle. The myth of great riches to be found in the UK, Canada, the US or elsewhere persists in Zimbabwe, encouraging people to leave and often resulting in resentments from those at home when funds are not forthcoming. As one informant from Matobo commented, “My husband’s brother’s son went to the UK. He went last year, but he’s already back. He was a nurse. He came back as it was so harsh there. The employment agents always exploit you, and it’s so difficult to look after families there, as there’s no help.”
The same applies to South Africa where the majority of migrants end up. These may be short-term jobs in the farms of Limpopo province or in the mines of the Rand, while the lucky few may secure jobs as teachers, lecturers or in business, where pay is reasonable. However, the conditions for Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa have deteriorated. As in many places, migrants are seen to be threatening local jobs and the rise of a populist and often violent xenophobia has resulted in life in South Africa becoming increasingly difficult, even dangerous as attacks increase. One of our informants in Wondedzo explained what happened to her brother. He was subject to an attack by a mob and he was burnt inside his locked house. He survived but was severely burnt and he returned home disabled and in need of continuous medical attention.
This is sadly not an isolated incident and, even if not resulting in injury or death, the underlying threats are there, generating anxiety, stress and a sense of continuous insecurity. The rising tensions and violence of South Africa makes many want to leave. As our informant explained, the only upside of this terrible story was that it dissuaded her sons from going to South Africa, and instead they have established homes on their now subdivided self-contained A1 farm and are making a living from agriculture at home. A combination of the decline of the South African economy, discrimination against migrants and xenophobic violence has meant that there is now a steady flow of returnees coming back to Zimbabwe from South Africa and seeking land for farming, a phenomenon reported across our sites.
Fast transfers: the revolution in electronic money
The ability to send funds to relatives back home has increased dramatically in recent years thanks to the growth of efficient electronic transfer systems, which are available everywhere.
Anyone sending remittances to Zimbabwe will be familiar with Western Union, World Remit and so on, alongside Mukuru and Mojomule, which are local equivalents. The system is quick and can be done on a phone in minutes with money being available at agent locations across the country. Today US dollars are usually available, and money can be received quickly at relatively low cost (for the amounts I generally transfer, I pay £2.90 to Western Union with an exchange rate which is not too bad). There are lots of opinions as to which system is best, and many we talked to preferred Mukuru as it has such a wide network and, especially for unregistered migrants in South Africa, the paperwork is considerably less for initial registration.
Such systems are complemented by the now ubiquitous Ecocash, which is immediate and based on mobile money transferred through phones. Transfers can happen in US dollars or Rands but also in RTGS or some combination. Ecocash transfers happen continuously moving funds around the country (and indeed the world as you can use the facility internationally) in large volumes. This has revolutionised the ability to manage money, facilitating investment, marketing and the payment of emergency costs across the rural areas.
Another form of remittance payment involves the buying of goods abroad and allowing relatives to pick them up at designated stores. This avoids the transfer of cash, which may end up not being put to good use but ensures that relatives are supplied with groceries (mostly), but also other goods. Hellopaisa is one such facility and is increasingly popular.
Compared to the past where cumbersome bank transfers or sending goods on buses were the norm, a whole suite of options is available for transferring funds today. This is vital for support for rural households, as well as helping to fuel investment and growth in agriculture, as many such investments we see across our sample farms can be directly traced to remittance payments, at least in part.
Changing flows
As noted above, remittance flows are neither static nor unidirectional. Changing economic conditions and increasing instability and violence means that long-established remittance destinations change. What happens in South Africa in the coming years, for instance, will have a huge impact on Zimbabwe. The return of migrants to seek land and farm in Zimbabwe is indicative of the value placed on having a rural home and the viability of farming as a livelihood. Coming back with some cash means that the capital constraints of getting going on a more intensified commercial operation are reduced. The growth of land leasing, rentals and land purchases across our sites, along with ongoing subdivision of plots to give land to children, is witness to the demand for land as an investment and livelihood option. This is not just returning diaspora migrants, but also other businesspeople, church leaders, those with political-military connections and others who see land as a good, safe source of income.
As many of our informants from both A1 and A2 resettlement areas point out, they no longer receive remittances from relatives in town or abroad but send them. As Mrs S from Matobo explained, “We sponsor our kids in town, not the other way round. Several are working single mothers and every time I harvest here, I send five 50kg bags of maize to town. Life in town is hard – much better to be here farming! In town you wake up in poverty, but here there’s always food, and you don’t have to pay. We’re trying to show our kids that life here is better. It’s different to the old communal areas where we were before – things are ‘modern’ in the resettlements!”
The flow of food and other agricultural goods (vegetables, meat and so on) from land reform areas is significant, and essential for food security and social protection in urban areas of Zimbabwe, as well as in communal areas where many settlers originally came from. This is a largely uncounted, unrecognised flow, but one that is central to the new economy of post-land reform Zimbabwe, likely outstripping many times over the overall value of the various donor projects supporting urban households with cash transfers and so on.
The remittance economy linked to land reform areas is vibrant and driving investment in rural areas, as well as supporting vulnerable households in towns and other rural areas across the country. Remittances do not flow in a single direction, are subject to changes in politics and economy both at home and abroad and involve an increasing number of transfer approaches that increase efficiency and enable quick responses. The changing dynamics of remittance flows remain under-studied yet are vitally important, as this blog has hopefully shown. Our future research will hopefully delve into this theme in more depth, adding some quantitative specification to some of the qualitative cases shared here.
How people make use of money – both from local farm production and from externally-derived sources – through approaches to saving in a highly volatile economy is the focus of the next blog in this series.
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