The many faces of Lack: an assessment of Model A2 farmers’ needs in Zibagwe Rural District Council in Midlands

Abstract

There is widespread agreement that the Land Reform Program was needed as a panacea to both rural and urban poverty as well as redressing historical imbalances in access to the most productive agricultural land. There are disagreements however, on which modalities would have worked best in implementing this program in light of the political, economic and legal environment that was prevailing in the country at the time of the onset of the FTLRP in particular. This dissertation assesses the needs of the A2 farmers in Zibagwe Rural District (ZRD), formerly a fully fledged large scale commercial farming area in the Midlands province of Zimbabwe. The assessment looked at how farmers raised capital, how they met their labour requirements, which other actors assisted them and what the farmers themselves saw as the policy blind spots in the structures of A2 farming in the FTLRP. The assessment took a continuous outlook/perspective, questioning farmers’ past and experiences and looked at what they proffered as suggestions to smoothen their farming in the future. These views were analyzed together with submissions from prior writings on the Land Reform in Zimbabwe as well as data from interviews of key informants who were involved in the Land Reform Administration in ZRD. The study’s findings indicated that the main challenges faced by farmers were their continued incapacitation by the absence of adequate land tenure structures, the legal documentation to cement their statuses as the occupants of the farms, their weak borrowing capacity and disturbances by both legal and illegal mineral prospectors, miners who run their mining activities parallel to the farmers’ agricultural activities on the same farms. The paper concludes by recommending the acceleration of finalization of tenure agreement by the government and improvements in LRAI’s capacity to administer the A2 schemes. There is need to depart from policies based on the anticipated ideals to new ones that are reflexively monitored by knowledge co-owned by the farmers, the government and the NGOs active in the area. The other recommendation is for the development of tailor-made loan schemes rooted in paradigms grounded in knowledge of farmers’ lived experiences