Zimbabwe next month will start paying partial compensation to white commercial farmers whose properties were seized nearly 20 years ago under Robert Mugabe’s land reforms, the government said Monday.
In a statement, the finance and agriculture ministries said they had budgeted 53 million Zimbabwean dollars ($18 million) in payments to “former farm owners affected by the land reform programme and who are in financial distress.”
More than 4,000 of the country’s 4,500 white farmers were stripped of their land under former president Mugabe’s highly controversial land seizures.
Mugabe justified the land grabs as a way to correct colonial-era land ownership disparities that had favoured whites and to stimulate economic growth for black Zimbabweans.
Critics blame the evictions for a collapse in agricultural production that forced Africa’s one-time bread basket to become dependent on imported food to feed its population.
Economic output fell by half following the land seizures which started in 2000 and the country’s economy has struggled since then.
The compensation will only be paid for improvements the former farm owners made to the land. It will not be paid for loss of the land…