Joint Ventures and Land Rentals in Tobacco: Limitations of Radical Land Reforms in a Neoliberal Economic Environment – the Case of Zvimba, Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform programme has led to the adoption of new patterns of land use by its beneficiaries. Tobacco farming is a case in point. By virtue of the crop’s export viability and driven by changes in land tenure brought about by the reform, investors and resettled farmers are entering into a new generation of land leases and joint-venture agreements. To varying degrees, these agreements are attempts by resettled farmers to mobilise the working capital they need for farming and attempts by investors – mostly white former farmers who lost land to the land reform programme – to regain access to land in order to apply their capital and know-how to farming. The very emergence of these arrangements suggests that Zimbabwe’s land reform programme, although radical, was not backed up by a corresponding financial strategy. The growing control of investors over land through these arrangements is also suggestive of a land reform reversal. This article draws on evidence of joint ventures in tobacco farming in the Zvimba district of Mashonaland West to argue that what are presented on the ground and in the literature as joint ventures are best characterised instead as land rental arrangements with asymmetrical power relations that favour investors. Despite the existence of national policy frameworks aimed at attracting investment in agriculture, there is no legal basis for the regulation of these joint ventures. Through examining the limitations of land reform, this article argues that the lease agreements, widely presented as joint ventures, constitute a certain reversal of the transformation attempted by the land reform programme.