Agricultural Land-delivery Systems in Zimbabwe: A Review of Four Decades of Sam Moyo's Work on Agricultural Land Markets and Their Constraints

Abstract

Rights to land have changed hands several times across Zimbabwe's racial, class, socioeconomic, and political divides over the past century. This has occurred through greatly varying mechanisms, depending more on sociopolitical power dynamics and less on the supply and demand of land. Discussion of agricultural land-delivery systems in Zimbabwe requires an understanding of the deeply embedded socioeconomic and political factors that have driven supply and demand of agrarian land. This paper examines Professor Sam Moyo's work on the evolution of land markets from the pre-independence era through the 2000s to the development of the new emerging land-market transactions in the countryside. Moyo's work shows how the state-led land-delivery system reconfigured the agrarian structure, changing it from a bimodal to a trimodal system. Giving due consideration to the different economic models that have been pursued by the Government of Zimbabwe since independence, and investigating how these have shaped power relations with regard to land, we attempt, from a political economy perspective, to develop an understanding of the land-reform program. Moyo's work on Zimbabwe's land markets shows how market-based approaches to land redistribution will always be inadequate for addressing social and historical injustices, because they favor capital at the expense of the peasantry. This article utilizes a tri-modal agrarian structure to analyze recent data from a 2013–2015 survey conducted by Sam Moyo Agrarian Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS). These data support Moyo's arguments: for example, that the pressure for Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) emanated from below, and that a spectrum of beneficiaries, outside the usual political elite, accessed land. Data analyses revealed continued demand for land from both local (informal markets) and international (large land deals) players, further substantiating Moyo's claim that there remains an unresolved land question in Zimbabwe.