Zimbabwe to start paying white farmers compensation after April

Reuters ^ | April 8, 2019 4:56 AM | MacDonald Dzirutwe

[Olog-hai]

Zimbabwe is to start paying compensation this year to thousands of white farmers who lost land under former president Robert Mugabe’s land reform nearly two decades ago, the government said, as it seeks to bring closure to a highly divisive issue.

Two decades ago Mugabe’s government carried out at times violent evictions of 4,500 white farmers and redistributed the land to around 300,000 black families, arguing it was redressing imbalances from the colonial era.

But land reform still divides public opinion as opponents see it as a partisan process that left the country struggling to feed itself.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government sees the paying of compensation to white farmers as key to mend ties with the West, and set aside $17.5 million in this year’s budget to that end. The initial payments will target those in financial distress, while full compensation will be paid later. […]

Colonialists seized some of the best agricultural land and much of it remained in the hands of white farmers after independence in 1980, while many blacks were landless. …

[Billthedrill]

Reuters stories on the topic still come spinning like an artillery shell but they missed the significant issue again. Zimbabwe's farming was forcibly altered from productive large-scale farming to small-scale subsistence farming, which now composes around 80% of all farming in that country. "Subsistence" farming is just that: they don't grow anything for sale to hungry city people. This is the very centerpiece of Marxist "land reform" and it doesn't work. They relearned that lesson in Venezuela a couple of years ago when forcing non-farmers into the field for "volunteer" (i.e. free) labor didn't result in the hoped-for cornucopia.

What you have in large-scale farming is a surplus that may tide you over in years of bad harvest. You don't get that with subsistence farming: a single bad harvest results in starvation. It's been that way for at least 10,000 years but the political people, they still haven't figured it out.