Has Zimbabwe’s land reform actually been a success? A new book says yes.

I’ve never been to Zimbabwe, so tend to get my messages from the news coverage. On land issues, that means a picture of a predatory state driving white farmers off the land and handing it out to cronies and bogus war veterans, who fail to produce anything much in the way of crops.

Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land, a new book co-authored by Joe Hanlon, Jeanette Mangengwa and Teresa Smart, sheds a very different light. Based on field visits, numerous conversations with farmers, and mining the available data, it paints a much more nuanced picture that is broadly positive about the impact of Zimbabwe’s land reform. It makes some telling points, including:

The media story about efficient white commercial farms is a half truth at best: at independence in 1980, 700,000 black farmers were squeezed onto 53% of the farmland, while 6,000 white farmers had 46% (and often the best land at that). Yet when Zimbabwe achieved majority rule, one third of white farmers were insolvent and a third were just about breaking even. Only 5% (300 people!) could be described as ‘very profitable’.

It often takes a generation for a land reform to produce results – the larger of Zimbabwe’s two post apartheid land reforms is only a decade old, but new farmers have already caught up with the previous white-dominated system in production (although of course, there are always better and worse farmers in any category). That is initially being achieved by bringing some of the idle land into production, but yields are also rising.

Zimbabwe is special in several ways: one of the best educated populations in Africa actually sees farming as a good way to earn a living. Those making a success of farming include ex army generals, teachers and businesspeople.

The book is not an apologia for Robert Mugabe’s government – it acknowledges corruption and cronyism, but argues that the more recent land reform was driven from below, initially in the face of Zanu opposition, before the government finally decided to accept a fait accomplit – ‘perhaps the only thing Robert Mugabe and the British Government agree on is a myth, namely that Mugabe was responsible for the land occupations’. The book also points out that not all cronies are the same – some are just interested in speculating on land values, but others have actually become successful commercial farmers.

The more recent land reform comes in two types: ‘A1’ farms handed out about 150,000 plots of 6 hectares to smallholders by dividing up large white farms, while the ‘A2’ model sought to create large black commercial farms by handing over much larger areas of land to about 23,000 farmers.

One side effect of Zimbabwe’s educational record is plentiful research and survey data, which the authors make the most of in exploring the impact of the land reform. Has most land gone to government cronies? No.  Large-scale black commercial farmers have received just 7% of the land handed out since independence.

The first half of the book covers this history, the second surveys today’s agriculture, with evocative reportage from the field supplementing the number crunching. The book draws lessons about which farmers succeed and which fail, and why.

Overall, a lot of the smaller A1 farmers (including a significant number of women beneficiaries of the land reform) have become successful small commercial producers, breaking into markets for tobacco, maize and barley, often as contract farmers. This despite the lack of support for new farmers (a contrast to the lavish support for white newbies in earlier times).

The big A2 farmers have faced more of a struggle, both because hyperinflation and economic crisis had more of an impact , and because political infighting and favouritism tends to target the big farms. The largely unreported story here, though, is that the dollarization of 2009 and subsequent economic stabilisation has led to a resurgence of agriculture.

Not all is great of course, land reform has led to deforestation, and gold panning is causing environmental damage. Paid agricultural workers now number more than a million, and often face low wages and poor working conditions. Water and irrigation remain a big challenge.

The book concludes:

‘In the biggest land reform in Africa, 6,000 white farmers have been replaced by 245,000 Zimbabwean farmers. Zimbabwe’s land reform has not been neat, and huge problems remain. But 245,000 new farmers have received land, and most of them are farming it. They have raised their own standard of living; have already reached production levels of the former white farmers; and with a bit of support, are ready to substantially increase that production.’

So who’s right, the book or the Daily Mail? I’m off to Zimbabwe for a few days in March, so hopefully will get a clearer idea then, but would love to hear your views before I head off.

And if you’re in London, there are two opportunites to hear from the authors this week – at Chatham House on Thursday, 31^st January, 5pm (need to book) and LSE today (28^th January), 6.30pm (no booking required).

Confronting scarcity by managing water, energy and land: the new European Report on Development

I have skimmed a few of the curtain raisers for next week’s Earth Summit in Rio, and sure enough, they fall into the familiar pattern of ‘If I ruled (or at least ‘managed’) the world’ documents: a summary of the research evidence, a call to arms (in this case save planet and species, preferably both), and a shopping list of policy recommendations.

In such reports, all solutions seem to be win-win. Beyond vague appeals for political will, there is almost no discussion of politics (there’s an election going on in the US – do you think that might be germane?), power (who gets to decide what, and what are their motivations) or the chain of events (shocks, elections, scandals, cumulative pressure from citizens, peer pressure from governments) that might possibly lead to something being agreed. Reports typically employ the passive tense – ‘innovation/cash/leadership is needed’, neatly avoiding having to identify just who has to do it, and why they might decide to do so.

Exhibit A: ‘Confronting Scarcity: Managing water, energy and land for inclusive and sustainable growth’ is the latest European Report on Development. I’ve been a bit rude about the ERDs in the past, but within the limits of the genre (see previous para – the exec sum has 84 uses of ‘manage’ or ‘management’, but only 8 of ‘politics’, ‘political’ or ‘empowerment’), this one’s actually quite good, in that it joins up issues and thinks in terms of whole systems. I think the ‘DSER framework’ (see below) may also stick. Highlights:

“This Report focuses on water, energy [actually, only renewable energy] and land (see graphic). It examines the constraints on each, the interrelationships between them and then considers how they can be managed together to promote growth in developing countries that is both socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

All actors must consider the full range of options in managing pressures on water, energy and land. So far the focus has been on partial solutions: Businesses emphasise the opportunities in increasing supply and raising resource efficiency; the green economy concept at Rio+20 highlights enhancing the resource base, resource efficiency, and sustainable consumption and production; NGOs highlight fair resource shares for the poor; others emphasise resilience against climate shocks. This ERD argues that the scale and urgency of the problems require transformative action in a combination of four pillars (DSER):

•  influencing demand patterns to reflect scarcity values (e.g. sustainable consumption and production by cutting waste and changing lifestyles)
•  improving the quantity and quality of supply (e.g. partnerships on renewable energy, soils, water storage through appropriate finance, regulation and knowledge sharing)
• increasing efficiency (e.g. technology transfer, national innovation systems)
•  increasing resilience against shocks and benefits for the poorest (e.g. benefit-sharing, social protection, Corporate Social Responsibility, inclusive land policy)

Action is particularly required in five areas:

1. Radically reduce the environmental footprint of consumption (especially, but not only, in developed countries such as the EU) to promote inclusive growth without increasing resource use.
2.  Promote innovation to increase agricultural productivity to feed more than 9bn people sustainably by 2050 and scale up renewable energy technologies that help to deliver sustainable energy for all by 2030.
3. Establish or reform institutions for an integrated approach towards managing resources.
4. Push for inclusive land policy to ensure access to land and water for the poorest and most vulnerable.
5.  Price natural resources and services comprehensively and appropriately (e.g. using instruments such as payments for ecosystem services, PES), whilst safeguarding the welfare of the poorest.

And a couple of other choice quotes:

“The new context for the management of natural resources poses severe risks for both inclusiveness and sustainability. The world has already trespassed three of the nine planetary boundaries within which it can operate safely: biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus loading and climate change. Ocean acidification and freshwater boundaries are expected to be next in the coming 50 years. The risk that tipping points are being reached, or will soon be reached, will jeopardise the future wellbeing of the poorest, who will be the hardest hit by environmental degradation. Applying the technology that lay behind the Green Revolution of the 1960s will not sustainably produce food for 9.3 billion people by 2050. The Earth’s natural resource base does not allow developing and emerging economies to reach consumption patterns that developed countries have followed and continue to follow (e.g. a reliance on meat consumption), hence distributional issues will have to be addressed, especially since technological progress has not been sufficient to decouple consumption of natural resources from economic growth.”

“Countries and groups that possess relevant assets will have new opportunities, but these come with social and environmental risks. Less well-endowed countries, regions and groups face different types of risks and opportunities (e.g. parts of northern China, India, Middle East and Southern Africa have little water, while countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar and Sudan have large tracts of land).”

There are good case studies on biofuels, managing the WEL Nexus in Kenya (see video) and the Brazilian ag boom.

Has anyone read any other particularly good curtain raisers, preferably with at least some discussion of power and politics? (and no, you’re not allowed to suggest your own…..)

What’s the state of the world’s water and land? New FAO report.

This is encouraging. Alex Evans has been banging on for a while about the need for a ‘World Resources Report’ that charts the state of planetary resource stocks (not flows, like all the other reports). Now the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has done exactly that. The State of Land and Water Resources (SOLAW) is FAO’s first flagship publication on the global status of land and water resources. New editions will be published every 3 to 5 years. Here’s the summary: 

“The world’s cultivated area has grown by 12 percent over the last 50 years. The global irrigated area has doubled over the same period, accounting for most of the net increase in cultivated land. Meanwhile, agricultural production has grown between 2.5 and 3 times, thanks to significant increase in the yield of major crops.

However, global achievements in production in some regions have been associated with degradation of land and water resources, and the deterioration of related ecosystem goods and services. These, include biomass, carbon storage, soil health, water storage and supply, biodiversity, and social and cultural services. Agriculture already uses 11 percent of the world’s land surface for crop production. It also makes use of 70 percent of all water withdrawn from aquifers, streams and lakes. Agricultural policies have primarily benefitted farmers with productive land and access to water, bypassing the majority of small-scale producers who are still locked in a poverty trap of high vulnerability, land degradation and climatic uncertainty.

Land and water institutions have not kept pace with the growing intensity of river basin development and the increasing degree of inter-dependence and competition over land and water resources. Much more adaptable and collaborative institutions are needed to respond effectively to natural resource scarcity and market opportunities.

Toward 2050, rising population and incomes are expected to call for 70 percent more food production globally, and up to 100 percent more in developing countries, relative to 2009 levels. Yet, the distribution of land and water resources does not favour those countries that need to produce more in the future: the average availability of cultivated land per capita in low-income countries is less than half that of high-income countries, and the suitability of cultivated land for cropping is generally lower. Some countries with rapidly growing demand for food are also those that face high levels of land or water scarcity. The largest contribution to increases in agricultural output will most likely come from intensification of production on existing agricultural land. This will require widespread adoption of sustainable land management practices, and more efficient use of irrigation water through enhanced flexibility, reliability and timing of irrigation water delivery.

The prevailing patterns of agricultural production need to be critically reviewed. A series of land and water systems now face the risk of progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agricultural practices. The physical limits to land and water availability within these systems may be further exacerbated in places by external drivers, including climate change, competition with other sectors and socio-economic changes. These systems at risk warrant priority attention for remedial action simply because there are no substitutes.

The potential exists to expand production efficiently to address food security and poverty while limiting impacts on other ecosystem values. There is scope for governments and the private sector, including farmers, to be much more proactive in advancing the general adoption of sustainable land and water management practices. Actions include not just technical options to promote sustainable intensification and reduce production risks, they also comprise a set of conditions to remove constraints and build flexibility. These include (1) the removal of distortions in the incentives framework, (2) improvement of land tenure and access to resources, (3) strengthened and more collaborative land and water institutions, (4) efficient support services including knowledge exchange, adaptive research, and rural finance, and (5) better and more secured access to markets.

Widespread adoption of sustainable land and water management practices will also require the global community to have the political will to put in place the financial and institutional support to encourage widespread adoption of responsible agricultural practices. The negative trend in national budgets and official development assistance allocated to land and water needs to be reversed. Possible new financing options include payments for environmental services (PES) and the carbon market. Finally, there is a need for much more effective integration of international policies and initiatives dealing with land and water management. Only by these changes can the world feed its citizens through a sustainable agriculture that produces within environmental limits.”

Main risks summarized in the map below (click on the link to get a decent sized version), plus lots of interactive maps on eg water scarcity here [h/t Richard King]

SYSTEMS_AT_RISK_MAP

How do we talk about resource limits, fair shares and development?

Fascinating morning earlier this week discussing Alex Evans’ new paper for WWF and Oxfam on ‘Resource Scarcity, fair shares and development’. Alex summarizes the paper in the Guardian, so I won’t rehearse his arguments for adding ‘fair shares’ to the more accepted topics of responding to resource scarcity by increasing production and strengthening resilience. Instead, here are some reflections coming out of the discussion + paper.

First, language is a minefield on this topic – taboos and neuralgic issues are everywhere. On the left, ‘scarcity’ offends the Amartya Sen fundamentalists who insist that ‘there’s enough food/water etc and distributional justice is all that matters, (and always will be)’; on the right, any talk of ‘limits’ leads to accusations of neo-Malthusian scaremongering – ‘scarcity will lead to price rises, which in turn will send signals to the market to innovate or substitute for expensive resources, so relax and above all, avoid regulation!’ Whether explicitly or implicitly, both left and right assume away limits – the cake can go on growing forever. I caricature, but not much.

The reaction from some of the government officials present on the question of limits was pretty discouraging. As one government rep at the meeting said, ‘even if limits are a subtext, the message is tainted. Zero sum games are just not attractive to politicians’. I ended up thinking that, in Europe at least, it may well be easier to talk about fair shares and distribution, than to broach the issues of resource limits.

On a more positive note, Alex adds a nice twist in his paper by portraying the problem of scarcity as a transitional one. The world faces impending resource crunches on atmospheric space, water, land, energy etc. In the end, the price signals and technological responses, combined with a plateauing and then decline in world population, may well eventually respond, but only with time lags. In the meantime, we need to think about how to protect poor people who are likely to come off worst in world of resource limits – the ‘fair shares’ agenda.

Second, I found myself wondering what an Andean peasant would make of all this talk of scarcity as if it is something new. We need to be clearer on the distinction between ‘new scarcity’ and ‘old scarcity’ and how they connect. Any poor person can talk to you about resource constraints – on water, land, energy etc and in many cases these are more immediately pressing than the ‘new scarcity’ produced by humanity approaching planetary boundaries. Old scarcity is local and political. New scarcity is both local and global, and has an absolute quality missing from old scarcity which, as Sen pointed out, is largely socially determined. Focussing exclusively on the global ‘new scarcity’ aspects would be a mistake – for example only talking about land in terms of land grabs by foreign investors, when in many cases the grabbers are local elites, and they have been doing it for centuries – this is just the latest price-driven twist in a long history.

Linked to this point is the need for a clearer typology of scarcities. It might be helpful to think about scarcity as lying along at least two axes: local to global in terms of where the responses are most effective, and in terms of the nature of the problem – public good to private good (i.e. whether the good can be privately owned like land, or is a common good, like air, or is somewhere in between, like water). Plotting this on a standard 2×2 matrix (see right for a very rough go at this) suggests that climate change/ limits to atmospheric space is the exception – most of the scarcities we are talking about are more local than global in their solutions, and more private than public in their nature. That suggests that we should be careful about lumping them all together or going too global, especially when it comes to solutions.

Final point. While lumping them together may not be a good idea, comparisons certainly are – cross fertilization can throw up some interesting ideas. Is water scarcity best approached purely through building adaptation and resilience, or is there (learning from climate change) something equivalent to mitigation – cutting water use, at least at national level? Would a water or land equivalent of the International Energy Agency be worth thinking about? Parallels with other major crises also might be helpful – why are limits so hard to accept on the use of resources, when they are seen as common sense in financial management – time for some eco-Thatcherite ‘you can’t live beyond your means’ messaging? In teh same vein, there’s eco-bubbles, eco-meltdowns, but sadly no eco bailouts.

And some weekend background viewing, a TED talk from Johan Rockstrom, the author of the ‘Planetary Boundaries’ concept – fascinating science and determinedly upbeat about the possibilities of survival if we act now. We could have done with him at the seminar……. [h/t Phil Bloomer]