Prioritise Agriculture

Source from:  Financial Gazette (Harare) 07/01/2005

FIVE years ago, it was hoped that the land reform programme would unlock the agricultural sector's immense potential, which would in turn move through the economy like an electric jolt and help government deal with poverty and inequality. What with tobacco destined for the unmanufactured international leaf market earning the country US$600 million annually and horticulture being the fastest growing industry. Not to mention the beef industry which then had a reputation for quality and was the supplier of choice to the lucrative EU market. The euphoria touched off by the radical land reform exercise however masked more sobering realities. The scandal-tainted programme slipped on too many banana skins, which had more to do with lack of strategic planning than the style, form and approach of the exercise even though this raised partisan shots from both sides of the political aisle. This is why the much-hoped-for agricultural revolution has largely remained a could-have-been-that-never-was, leaving Zimbabwe with the spectre of what might be the biggest sectoral failure in the history of the country. Indeed, with the country's food security situation at its most precarious and agriculture adding very little, if any value to the national economy, the back-to-the-land idealism could very well come unstuck - a victim of lack of planning. Logic dictates that once the government identified agrarian reforms as one area of intervention to achieve national food self-sufficiency and economic empowerment for the historically marginalised majority blacks, it was critical to ensure that there was planning in advance, well before the exercise to parcel out large tracts of land to deserving individuals commenced in earnest so as to prepare for or guard against any eventualities. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be evidence that this was the case. On the contrary, government seemed to have been in a hurry to give out land for political expediency as if giving people land was the be-all and end-all for ensuring food security and economic empowerment. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Redistributing land, while a noble idea, is not a goal unto itself but a means to an end. Suffice to say though that nothing succeeds where there is no planning. History is unequivocal on that. Hence the chaos in the critical agricultural sector where there was no plan necessarily laid down and the disposal of time was surrendered merely to the chances of incident. If this were not the case, then matters agricultural should have been prioritised if government knew how the process was going to unfold. Without belabouring the point, government should, like a novelist, have known what its last chapter in the story of the land reform programme was going to say and one way or other work towards that chapter. This did not however seem to be so. Otherwise the lion's share of national resources should have been channelled towards bolstering and enhancing agriculture through the rehabilitation and expansion of irrigation equipment and infrastructure to offer a fall back position seeing that the country is subject to the vagaries of intermittent but devastating droughts. True, Zimbabwe had an irrigation infrastructure in place and in some provinces dams were indeed grossly underutilised but the capacity of the irrigation infrastructure needed bolstering to cater for the increasing numbers of farmers in the face of land reform. It is disappointing, to say the least, that it is only now that the government is talking about the need to boost the country's irrigation facilities more as an afterthought that could have gone unthought of, when this should have been part of the long-term plan. Why then the seeming lack of vision and clarity of thinking if government believes that in agriculture, lies the seed of economic prosperity and self-sufficiency? The mind boggles! Apart from guaranteeing a reliable state-of-the-art irrigation infrastructure, such long term planning would also have put paid to the land reform exercise's terrible aura where scores of newly settled farmers are, instead of productively using their land, destroying it through deforestation and environmental degradation for want of critical inputs. It is an open secret that most of the erstwhile peasant farmers allocated land did not have capacity, which is why the gears did not immediately engage soon after these farmers were allocated the land. As we have said before, over the past five years, most of these farmers were left devastated with a psychology of impotence and pessimism against a background of biting shortages of fertilisers, seed and chemicals among other critical inputs - which again boils down to lack of long term planning on the part of the scapegoating and blundering officials running the country's agriculture who have ironically been sermonising the nation on the need for food self-sufficiency. Not only that but a well-thought out long-term plan for the land reform programme could have made provision for checks and balances and in the process prevented the flagrant violation of the government's one-man-one-farm policy which, in the court of public opinion, borders on criminality. It is against this background that we feel that it is all very well for the government to talk about its plans for bolstering the irrigation infrastructure but it should be noted that no plan is worth the paper it is written on until it gets you doing something. It's no longer time for rhetoric but action. Government should now show resolve and walk the talk if land reform is to become a genuine avenue of redress for those negatively affected by historical injustices. Enditem