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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 4. March 19 1979

Distribution of land and people

[unclear: Distribution] of land and people

To place the figures in the table in their [unclear: rect] perspective, it is necessary to [unclear: con-er] the populations these areas have to support. At the end of 1976, there were 680,000 African far men and 6,682 European farmers, so, on average, European farmers have approximately 100 times as much land, which is also of greater natural fertility. In the same year there were 332,000 African labourers on the European land, amounting to 97% of the rural workforce in the European areas.

The total population in the African areas is four times that in the European, and this massive overcrowding has brought an ecological disaster to the land. The overcrowding is reflected in the TTLs where some 40% of the men aged between 16 and 30 were landless (only men can own land in TTLs) while 675,000 tribal cultivators have less than 10 acres each. The reason that acutely over-populated African areas were created alongside under-populated European areas was that Zimbabwe's development was based on a cheap source of labour (as was South Africa's).

In the 1920's, because Africans couldn't be induced to leave peasant agriculture to work for the white economy, 50% of the urban workforce was made up of foreign labour. Africans continued to rely on peasant agriculture until forced removals of thousands to the reserves, alone with population increases, made production levels inadequate and land scarce. Africans then became more "willing" to work in the cities.

The city workers remained migrant workers however, keeping their agricultural links because (i) the wages were low and they depended on supplementing income from peasant agriculture; (ii) they were not allowed to bring families to town in most cases. The same situation applied to many of the workers on European farms though some were able to bring families to live with them on the "farm compounds".

The TTLs therefore came to provide reservoirs of cheap labour. In the TTLs average income from farming is around 10 pounds per month. Half the urban labour force receives less than 45 pounds per month (Poverty datum line 90 pounds) and farm labourer receive even less.

In the 1960s and 1970s these policies were too successful and more workers left from the TTLs than could be employed. Thus foreign workers have been repatriated and thousands of Zimbabwean Africans exported to South Africa, still leaving vast numbers unemployed.

But these measures have not proved successful. European commercial agriculture is far from efficient. Much of the European land is under-utilised or not used at all. Production is dominated by a small number of large farms of over 15,000 acres. In 1976, 271 European farming units contributed 52% of the total taxable income, while 30% of all farms were insolvent.