Beneficiaries are actors too.pdf - Southern Institute of Peace ...

lack of respect for property rights that resonated through western
media that attracted the wrath of the West on Zimbabwe. Despite
the fact that the UK government at that time (under Tony Blair)
had reneged on commitments by his predecessors to fund Land
reform in Zimbabwe, the whole western block cast a blind eye on
that very important fact and chose to focus on issues that were at
best results of their failure to honour their pledges to support the
land reform programme.
The common perceptions or misperceptions peddled by the
British and the USA media and other Western broadcasting
stations is that the land reform is a disastrous failure and did not
achieve the desired results of poverty reduction and its
accompanying benefits. Allegations of heavy political cronyism,
which could be partly true, are advanced with emotion and gusto
to the point of a misrepresentation of the true picture obtaining.
Figures are profusely quoted detailing how the “land grab” has
negatively impacted on productivity on the farms and has
reduced total agricultural yields annually. On the contrary,
recent studies by the United Kingdom based Institute of
Development Studies (IDS) and the African Institute of Agrarian
Studies (AIAS) have shown that most beneficiaries of the land
reform programme were ordinary people and the elites
constituted a small proportion of the beneficiaries (Elich, 2011).
The plummet in agricultural productivity in the years
immediately succeeding the fast track land reform though, in a
sense, could be blamed on the latter process, but it is however not
entirely true that it was solely as a result of the land reform that
agriculture suffered. Southern Africa as a region suffered from
perennial droughts from 2001 to 2005 and the region is also
vulnerable to climate change which can also cause uncertain
rainfall patterns. The black large scale and small holder farmers
proved their worth in the closing stages of the decade when
favourable rain patterns were experienced. Agricultural output in
2009 grew by 15% and by 34% in 2010. Smallholder maize
production jumped from 0.57 million tonnes in 2007-2008 to
1.35 million tonnes in 2009-2010. Tobacco production more than
doubled from 2009 (www.ngojobsinafrica.com/). Despite huge
financial and attendant challenges as a result of a critical lack of
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