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Zimbabwe's agricultural ‘success’ and food security in Southern Africa
Abstract
Zimbabwe's track record is being touted as the latest ‘miracle’ that should be copied in promoting agricultural production. It has indeed succeeded in producing food surpluses in most years and its African smallholders have greatly increased their contribution to marketed crop production since 1980. This article seeks to explore how far it can be the basis for a ‘model’ for agricultural development, at least for the ‘labour‐reserve economies’ of southern Africa (including even a reformed South Africa). In order to do that it first explores the basis for such success as has occurred but also spells out the limits of these ‘successes’, what areas of necessary agrarian transformation have not yet been addressed and how these might be tackled.
It will be shown that smallholders in the former ‘reserves’ have responded to removal of settler colonialism's imposed barriers and to the extension to them of new opportunities of credit and inputs and of centralised (not as the World Bank would prefer ‘free’ marketing structures, both of which had been built up to serve large‐scale white settler farming. These benefits have been confined to a minority of regions and of better‐off peasants and have not solved the problems of poverty faced by the majority. The long‐run need to transform the technical, social and environmental limitations of the agrarian system in the smallholder ('communal') areas and to generate a more democratic, productive and sustainable system have still to be tackled. It is argued that to do so will require a second stage of agrarian reform that will be constitutionally more possible in 1990, reform that integrates changes in ‘communal’ agriculture with continued redistribution of the large scale commercial holdings of the white settlers. In this respect Zimbabwe can build on its ‘resettlement programme’ which has been a qualitative success in production terms (though one whose positive record has been denied by various vested interests) even if not yet on a sufficiently large scale.
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Bush and Cliffe. . ROAPE . , Vol. 29: