eBusiness Weekly
Ishemunyoro Chingwere
Lands, Agriculture, Water and Rural Resettlement Minister Perrance Shiri, will soon present the initial report of the land audit to Cabinet after exhaustively going through it to determine the requisite policy intervention strategies that can help boost the country’s agriculture production.
The land audit is being carried out by the Zimbabwe Land Commission (ZLC) and had, as at September last year, covered 57 000 farms.
The audit was commissioned as a way to help inform Government’s agriculture policy in a bid to stimulate production and development in all the country’s agriculture land.
Agriculture is one of the key corner stones which is primed to inspire Zimbabwe’s economic revival prospects towards an upper middle-income economy status by 2030.
Addressing journalists at the post cabinet briefing on Tuesday, Minister Shiri said there was still a lot of work to be done with regards the actual auditing itself as well as sifting of findings at ministry level before these can be presented in Cabinet.
The audit, he said, was not only limiting its scope to land that was parcelled out under the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme as is widely speculated, but rather on all agriculture land in the country.
“The land audit report is on my desk as we speak,” said Minister Shiri.
“It covers a number of districts coming from across all the provinces.
“Once I have gone through the report and I am satisfied, I will then submit it to Cabinet, thereafter it shall be made public.
“There is still a lot of work to be done, we have got a lot of farms both smallholder as well as the medium and large-scale farms which are still to be audited.
“So what we have, as a report at the moment, only covers a certain percentage of the farms and mind you the land commission is charged with all the agricultural land so when it carries out the land audit it’s not only focusing on land which came about as a result of land reform,” he said.
Among other key result areas, the audit will flush out multiple farm owners and help Government further the “one man one farm” principle which is aimed at affording
more farmers a chance to own productive land.
The audit is meant to flush out farm owners holding onto productive land but with no corresponding production to match the actual potential of the land.
