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Edited on Thu Sep-01-05 07:31 AM by 1932
The land that has been transfered and is subject to this law was promissed to Zimbabwe in an agreement signed by the British decades ago. The British never met any of the milestones promissed under that agreement. Despite the fact that, hypothetically speaking, all this land was subject to a ticking time clock for transfer, the values of the land (albeit low, because it was originally aquired by force and not by paying FMV) never decreased. You know this because there were so many stories about people buying land right up to 1999 and then expressing outrage that it was confiscated, in what was, to me, a Captain Renault-like (in Casablanca) sense of shock. I'm shocked, shocked! that we have to keep our promise to give the land to the people from whom we took it by violent, murderous force as late as 1960s! I'm shocked that our promises are binding!
So, notwithstanding what should have been assumed to happen eventually due to an international treaty and human justice, nobody whose power derived from imperial relationships with the former colonizers (ie, western corporations) believed that this land would ever by transferred. That's a very interesting commentary on things. Now, Zimbabwe's new laws are sort of the flip side of the attitude expressed by the tobacco farmers and artichoke growers connected with western corporations. Whereas nobody believed the law would be followed before the late 1990s, now Zimbabwe is saying to the same people, don't believe for a second that the law will be undone (with the purpose of making sure that the current uses of the farms won't be undervalued because of uncertainty of title).
Setting degrees of authoritarianism aside for a moment, this is the opposite of Bush (and western, post-colonialism, and neoliberalsm).
Also, from a purely economic point of view, you have to appreciate why they are doing this. Say you were a colonial farmer in 1776 America. Say you wrenched the land away from Britain. Now you want to farm it. To do that you have to build barns and invest in machinery to get the full value out of the land. If there were any doubt about whether the title to that land would go back to Britain, not only would you personally be reluctant to invest your sweat and whatever capital you have in that land in order to extrat its full economic value, it would probably be hard to get a bank to give you a loan. What you'd need was a clear, legally binding (ideally, constitutional) rule that title has transferred and that there has been a final, unappealable judgement to that effect.
Now, it helps Mugabe I guess in an abstract sense that these land title transfers happen and are final. But I don't believe that this helps Mubabe personally more than it helps all of Zimbabwe on a macroeconomic level. Mostly this is about making sure that people feel that they can start putting resources into the land without having to calculate-in the chance that they'll lose the land.
I think that's probably the other side of the story you're not going to get from the MSM.
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