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Land Reforms Chaos: Zimbabwe Wants Some White Farmers Back

Land Reforms Chaos: Zimbabwe Wants Some White Farmers Back

In what can be termed as further chaos in Zimbabwe’s land reforms program, that started with the eviction of white commercial farmers from the land at the break of the this century, the President Robert Mugabe led government is considering offering back land to some of the white farmers it evicted.

In 1999, the Zimbabwean government  violently evicted more than 4,000 white farmers from their land and instituted a controversial land reform program the sort to give these parcels of land to black farmers.

The program was however a big failure and pushed a country that was considered “the bread basket of Africa” to an importer of basic food commodities.

According to a Bloomberg report, The Southern Africa country has suffered an estimated $12 billion in lost agriculture production since the land occupations took place

Now the tide is changing and senior official in Mugabe’s government have muted a plan to return some of these land to white farmers nearly 15 years after the government seized land from them.

“On the one hand you see government offering letter to some farmers and on the other hand you see people being evicted from their farms led by government and senior politicians,” Hendrik Oliver, a director at Commercial Farmers Union whose members are largely whites, told CCTV Africa.

“One of these particular farmers that we are talking about has been notified in March at the beginning of this year that he will be getting an offer letter, but to this date he’s yet to see the offer letter.”