Zimbabwe's white farmers vow to press on

HARARE - Zimbabwe's remaining white commercial farmers have vowed to keep tilling the land in the face of proposed constitutional changes that would bar them from challenging land seizures in court.

President Robert Mugabe's government has seized thousands of white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks after often violent invasions by state-backed veterans of the country's 1970s struggle against white rule.

The government, with an enlarged majority after elections in March, is proposing a constitutional amendment that will bar individuals whose land was seized from making a court challenge, with the exception of the amount paid for compensation.

"The farmers have not given up on their country and are doing what they can to get back into real, unfettered production," Stoff Hawgood, the Commercial Farmers' Union vice-president, told an annual congress of the dwindling group.

"Despite the negatives ... we have a future in agriculture in Zimbabwe."

The CFU says nearly 4000 white farmers have been dispossessed, leaving between 600 and 800 still on their land.

Hawgood said there was demand for Zimbabwe's farmers elsewhere on the continent after the successful launch of a pilot project in Nigeria, where a group displaced by the government's land policies have started growing crops again.

"Other African countries are inquiring every day how they too can benefit from this opportunity to restart their commercial agriculture," he said.

Zimbabwean farmers have also set up shop in fertile countries such as Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique, boosting the production of crops like tea and tobacco.

A senior Zimbabwe official said at the weekend the government would not invite back white farmers whose land was seized, despite calls by the central bank chief to allow them to help the struggling agriculture sector.

Once the mainstay of the economy, commercial agriculture is reeling from the government's land reforms, which critics say have been chaotic and poorly conceived.

Official statistics show sector output fell by 3.3 per cent in 2004, worsening food shortages that aid agencies say could threaten up to a third of the country's 12 million people.

Mugabe's government says the land seizures are necessary to redress ownership imbalances created by Britain's 1890s colonisation of the southern African state.

- REUTERS