Agrarian policy in migrant labour societies: reform or transformation in Zimbabwe?

Abstract

This paper deals with one basic problem that southern African countries will have to face in any transformation of their agriculture: if these societies are ‘labour reserves’ can they be easily transformed so as to eliminate labour migration. Zimbabwe seems to have an official policy of ending ‘divided families’ by pushing some into being unambiguously working class families with no land and others into a settled, non‐migratory peasantry. Thus former white‐owned land is only distributed to those without jobs. But this could be only a more radical variant of plans that were attempted in the 1950s to end migrant labour. Are today's plans for separating out worker‐peasants into separate classes any more realistic? Isn't there some danger of creating a landless, unemployed stratum in between, and of ignoring the needs of women heads of households? May it not be better to recognise that combining paid work and farming may have to continue for some time as Mozambique and Nicaragua seem to have done?

Zimbabwe's land reform: new political dynamics in the countryside

“…They are very different to the earlier mass of rural people in the former 'reserves' (now communal areas), created in the colonial era as a labour pool and place for retirement where small amounts of poor-quality land provided some form of social security, in the absence of other state support (Arrighi 1970), although class divisions and development challenges remain similar (cf. Bush and Cliffe 1984;Cousins, Weiner, and Amin 1992).…”

Changing agrarian relations after redistributive land reform in Zimbabwe

“…Settler-colonial accumulation by dispossession from 1890 created a labour reserve economy (Amin 1972) dependent on cheap domestic and foreign migrant labour (Arrighi 1973). Peasant farming, rural small-scale industry and commerce were repressed through extra-economic regulations and taxes, but this did not create full-scale proletarianisation (Bush andCliffe 1984, Yeros 2002). Racial and class inequalities in the agrarian relations were consolidated by discriminatory subsidies to large-scale farmers (Moyo 2002) and narrow import substitution exportled strategies.…”

Land reform & changing social relations for farm workers in Zimbabwe

“…Grazing areas, averaging less than 15 hectares per family, are utilised as communal land by village members, to the exclusion of outsiders. The available grazing, arable and homestead areas have been declining as the Communal Area population increases (Kinsey, 1983;Bush and Cliffe, 1984;Cusworth and Walker, 1988;Cliffe, 1989;Bratton, 1990Bratton, ,1994.…”