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Zimbabwe Refuses To Compensate Evicted White Farmers While Country Faces Food Crisis

By Jinger Jarrett
Published on: 08:02 PST, Mar 24, 2016

As Zimbabwe faces a food crisis, white farmers who have been evicted from their land are being refused compensation for their loss. Farmers who assumed ownership of the white landowners’ land are refusing to pay compensation after taking ownership of it.

Yahoo News reported that compensating white farmers for the loss of their land is part of a deal that would help Zimbabwe to get international funding for their country. The deal hit a snag when the black farmers who currently are in possession of the land claim they don’t have the funds to pay the compensation.

The new farmers who took possession of the land in Zimbabwe had few skills for farming and are struggling to get by to make ends meet. The problem began in 2000 when President Robert Mugabe sought to correct what he called colonial injustices in Zimbabwe, and evicted thousands of experienced white farmers from their land. Zimbabwe now has only a fraction of the food output that it once had, and with the drought currently in Africa, Zimbabwe is facing a food shortage.

As previously reported in Inquisitr, another farmer in South Africa was murdered over the weekend. Like farmers previously in Zimbabwe, many of the farmers in South Africa are white. Farmers in South Africa hold the most dangerous occupation in the world. They are murdered at a higher rate than in any other country. Although police have refused to label the crimes as racial, claiming they are robberies instead, most of the farmers who have been murdered are white, and very little was taken.

The current package of reforms in Zimbabwe included resettling 300,000 families onto farmland that had been previously seized from white farmers. Those resettled onto the land would be expected to pay rent for the use of the land, and a fund would be created to reimburse those previously evicted from the land. The inability to pay would lead to a major setback for the government, which is trying to shore up the economy. All farmland in Zimbabwe is currently owned by the government, and because of it, it makes it difficult for farmers to get loans from banks to pay for seeds and farm implements.

News Day reported that Zimbabwe is also facing a food crisis, and the government needs to act to solve it because of the number of starving people in the country. Dawa, a farmer in Malawi, says she is scared because of what is happening.

“From the look of things this year, I am scared. I have never witnessed such a poor rainfall pattern since I was born. There have been times in the past when the rains would be problematic, but this year’s dry spell is beyond our comprehension.”

Dyna, like many other farmers, relies heavily on rainfall to grow her crops and feed her family. This year her crops are failing, and storms like El Niño have only increased the problems for farmers across Southern Africa. These failures have caused ever increasing food prices, and Zimbabwe is having to import food from places like South Africa to feed its people. The Southern African Development Community (Sadc) is preparing to host a meeting in Botswana to tackle the crisis and determine how to get the funding needed to feed the millions of people affected.

[Photo by John Moore/Getty Images]

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