Från OneWorld South Asia, en artikel om Mugabes landreformer, där de vita jordägarna fick flytta på sig, bland annat för att de ansågs ha orättmätigt lagt beslag på den bästa marken. Men reformen fick inte väntat resultat:
Handing over lands of 4000 white farmers to black natives under President Mugabe's land reform programme has resulted in a deteriorating farming scene in the country ...
As we look out over thousands of untended citrus trees he explains that all they produce now are shrivelled, bitter lemons. "As a country we are losing millions of dollars, and as ordinary Zimbabweans we can no longer afford to send our children to school."
Men det finns de som försvarar reformen:
... we are satisfied that the programme of land reform has succeeded ... It might not be 100%, but now the land is with the people of Zimbabwe [...] Had they agreed to share nicely, none of these troubles would have happened ...
Mer här.
På Center for Global Development finns bilder av marken från Google Earth, före och efter landreformen:
Gränsen mellan det privatägda och det allmänna landet syns tydligt - så tydligt att det knappast kan förklaras av skillnader i nederbörd eller jordkvalitet. Gränsen som syns är den mellan jordbruk som drivs i vinstintresse och allmänningens tragedi. Och efter reformen, har allt land blivit mindre grönskande.
Craig J. Richardson skriver:
Instead of improving both, the move towards equality has had ironic results: commercial farming sector now increasingly resembles the communal lands. The once irrigated commercial land is brown and scorched, and the reservoirs have dried up due to a lack of parts. [...]
The underlying wealth of the commercial farmland derived from the protection of private property, an institutional centerpiece that has now been abandoned [...]
Since the post-2000 land reforms, commercial agricultural production has dropped up to 75 percent, as individuals have lost initiative to work, collateral no longer exists, and banks have collapsed.
För den som vill läsa mer: Richardson, Craig (2006), "Land Reform in Zimbabwe" in De Soto, Hernando and Francis Chevenal, Swiss Human Rights Book, Vol.1: Realizing Property Rights, Berne: Rueffer and Rub, pp. 74-84.