Land Reform, Growth and Equity: Emerging Evidence from Zimbabwe's Resettlement Programme

Zimbabwe's resettlement programme is nearly twenty years old. The first families were resettled in 1980, just a few months after independence, and the programme has to date resettled over 70,000 families, well short of the target of 162,000 set in the early 1980s. A tension exists over where the programme goes from here. The rhetoric of the 1996 presidential elections, which presented land reform as an urgent task to be finished (the same rhetoric is conspicuous in the run-up to the 2000 parliamentary elections), is confronted by assessments, emanating both from within and outside government, that resettlement is a failure. However, this paper argues that negative assessments of Zimbabwe's land reform are both premature and have used inappropriate criteria. A long-term perspective is taken, incorporating experience from elsewhere in the region, that suggests that any attempt at comprehensive evaluation of the benefits of resettlement in less than a generation is ill-advised. The focus is not so much the programme as a whole but rather the households participating in it. In broad terms, the paper takes the original - largely political - objectives of the programme, which placed great emphasis on welfare and poverty alleviation, and assesses the extent to which these have been met, at least insofar as can be judged from a 15-year, 400-household panel study and comparison with a contrasting group of communal area households. The empirical core of the paper investigates the benefits from resettlement using a set of variables defining income, consumption and welfare at the household level. The paper also addresses a broader development issue: the possibility of simultaneously achieving economic growth and improving the distributional equity of the benefits of growth.