Zimbabwe farmers flee, start over

For the last five months, Ben, another new Zimbabwean farmer, and his business partner, have lived in army-green tents without electricity or running water while they rebuilt the ruins of a small, 1928 house and planted their new 250 hectare farm. In less than half a year, acres of well-tended tobacco and corn crops have sprung up and two dozen employees work the fields and wooden tobacco drying sheds. The farm's neat fields are a stark contrast to the thatched huts and small family plots of corn that otherwise dot the landscape.

With their families still in Zimbabwe until the farm is running smoothly, they have only each other for company. Their neighbors speak only Portuguese, the country's official language. The only English-speaking inhabitants are two Peace Corps volunteers teaching in the local school 2.5 miles away.

Financially, moving to Mozambique has meant starting over for most farmers. The Zimbabwean government has severely limited the amount of money and property they can take out of Zimbabwe and land ownership rules in Mozambique make it difficult to acquire financing. One relic of Mozambique's Marxist past is that there is no private land ownership. Land must be leased from the state, at a rate of about $1 a year for three acres, but no bank will take that lease as collateral for a loan.

"The problem is finance," says one farmer. "There are billions of dollars worth of knowledge among Zimbabwe farmers, but very little capital. That's why there's not a hundred farmers here."

The Mozambican government says it has received between 70 and 80 applications from white Zimbabwean farmers, but most are still struggling to get financing or to find available land. Only about a dozen have so far managed to settle in the provinces Manica or Tete, along the border between the two countries.

In general, the people of Mozambique have welcomed the new farmers for the jobs and experience they bring. Ben employees 25 people, the Evans family 75. A survey by a local farmers' union indicated that there was widespread support for the new farmers and a hope that they would help introduce new farming techniques to Mozambique's largely sustenance farming community.

Many of the new farmers say they will return to Zimbabwe if the opposition MDC wins the election and ends the government's land seizure program. But few hold out much hope that the MDC will be allowed to win, regardless of what the people say at the polls on March 9 and 10.

Before long, some predicted, the countryside of Zimbabwe will look like that of Mozambique, with the ruins of scattered farmhouses as the only testament to the flourishing commercial agriculture that once thrived there.

"I have no doubt that if things go on as they are, my farmhouse in Zimbabwe will be roofless in six months," says the MDC supporter. "The country will disintegrate into nothing within a year."

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