Zimbabwe has streamlined the sizes of all individual farms in the country’s five ecological regions, in a move that will see more people having access to land.
The reduction in farm sizes will also boost capacity utilization of land following concerns that some farms were unnecessarily big and underutilized.
The government compulsorily acquired over 12 million hectares of arable land previously occupied by white farmers, resulting in some black beneficiaries getting vast swathes of land they cannot put to effective use.
According to the new law, no person shall own a farm in natural region one if the size of the farm exceeds 250 hectares or region two if the size of the farm exceeds 500 hectares. In region three, the farm can not exceed 700 hectares, 1000 hectares in region four or 2000 hectares in region five.
In some cases, some people were multiple farm owners in those prime regions, denying others an opportunity to have access to land.
President Mnangagwa has on several occasions hinted that once the full land audit report was out, the government would repossess some of those farms and allocate them to others in need of land.
