That the Mashona had done the same to the previous non-Bantu inhabitants is also undeniable. There is also the claim, made by the former Prime Minister Ian Smith amongst others, that the land that was taken was largely uncultivated because the earth was too thick to be ploughed with primitive equipment. Before I get any irate e-mail I would like to stress that I do not know whether this is justification or excuse, I am not an agronomist. However, the one bright spot on Zimbabwe s economic horizon are the tobacco farms. The farms that have been expropriated and genuinely parceled out for subsistence farming provide a living for a fraction of the people that the Tobacco farms do.
Land reform is very dangerous.
The problem with this efficiency is that it comes at a cost. They also maintain that wealth is a matter of owning resources, not how those resources are used. The Zimbabwe government tried to satisfy this land hunger by buying up vacant farms and resettling veterans from the insurrection on these plots. This has not satisfied the land hunger because the farms tend to go to high government officials and the farms gradually go to ruin. Mugabe has been in trouble recently.