Land Reform in Zimbabwe

Land reform in Zimbabwe addresses a colonial-era legacy in which British settlers had seized the large majority of the country' s arable land, leaving most of the indigenous population landless; following independence in 1980, President Robert Mugabe pursued land redistribution as a central policy goal, culminating in the fast-track land reform program launched in 2000, which amended the constitution and legislation to allow the government to seize commercial farms without compensation. The program transferred roughly 20 percent of Zimbabwe' s land from white-owned commercial farms to smallholder and medium-scale black farmers in one of the most radical land redistributions of the modern era, but its implementation was accompanied by widespread violence, politically motivated discrimination in plot allocation and a sharp decline in commercial agricultural output that contributed to a prolonged national economic crisis.