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Patrick Chitumba Midlands Bureau Chief
MIDLANDS province has commenced a land audit that will see underutilised land being repossessed.
The main focus of the exercise would be A2 farms.In an interview yesterday, the provincial chief lands officer, Joseph Shoko, said the provincial land audit was targeting to repossess over 80,000 hectares of land for redistribution at the completion of the exercise.

He reiterated that multiple farm owners and those without capacity to utilise the farms were going to lose out.

“We’ve started a land audit exercise in the province aimed at downsizing farms especially those in the hands of multiple farm owners.

Most of them are failing to utilise the land. This is just a provincial land audit, not a national audit,” said Shoko.

He said farms exceeding 1,000 hectares would be downsized to about 500 hectares.

Shoko said there were a lot of farms in the province which were over 2,000 ha and were underutilised.

He called on farm owners who were failing to utilise land to come forward and surrender it on their own.

By so doing, Shoko said, the farmers would save the land audit team time.

“We’re looking at those with no capacity but have large pieces of land lying idle. We’re going to downsize to about 500 hectares,” said Shoko.

He said the province had 12,000 people on the land waiting list.

Shoko said people on the waiting list would be considered first for the land redistribution exercise once the audit was complete.

“There would be no sacred cows. We aren’t going to give preferential treatment to anyone. We’ll take farms from all individuals who aren’t fully utilising them,” he said.

Government recently said it would take over all farms that were being under-utilised since the launch of the successful land reform programme in 2000.

It said the underutilised land would be given to people who are committed to producing food for the nation.

The government embarked on the land redistribution programme after the country inherited a racially skewed land ownership pattern which favoured white commercial farmers. The white community which constituted less than one percent of the population, occupied 45 percent of the agricultural land.

Seventy-five percent of this is in the high rainfall areas of Zimbabwe, where the potential for agricultural production was high.