The political economy of land acquisition and redistribution in Zimbabwe, 1990-1999

This article analyses the socio-economic and political implications of land acquisition in Zimbabwe in the 1990s generally, and particularly in 1997 w hen the government identified 1,471 farms for potential acquisition and red istribution to black smallholder farmers. The efforts to acquire land for r edistribution occurred in the context of growing research interest in compa ring land reform across southern Africa, despite the different historical e xperiences. The Zimbabwean case has been cast as an attempt to pursue a rad ical state-led approach to land redistribution through compulsory land acqu isition, or as a failed bureaucratic and 'non-transparent' effort. In contr ast, the South African experience came to be held up as a more democratic, transparent, community driven and less costly 'market assisted' approach. S tereotypes in the literature on land reform in southern Africa influence th e process of resolving the land question. While the dominant trend seems to be an acceptance of market prescription from the donor community, the Zimb abwean state, in particular, has intervened in the so-called land market in a more radical way. Attempts to acquire land in 1997, six years after the formal adoption of the Structural Adjustment Programme, led the internation al community to believe that land reform was being used as a strategy to bo lster an 'unpopular' regime. The overall conclusion of the article is that the dominant fear that state-led land reform will bring economic collapse i s unfounded, given the social and political implications of a failure to ad dress the land question.