ABSTRACT
Over six million people live in Zimbabwe's marginal rural lands, restricted from access to the bulk of the nation's natural resources. Inequitable access to these resources means that 4,500 mainly white, large-scale farmers dominate Zimbabwe's agrarian economy. These imbalances dramatically skew Zimbabwe's income distribution structure and reflect an unchanged legacy of colonial rule. The growth of poverty, unemployment and income disparities due to the under-utilisation of Zimbabwe's land and natural resources is the main factor which fuels today's land question. The key issue facing Zimbabwe's land reform policy is how to balance the control and access to land by redistributing land from large-scale landholders who underutilise their land to new small and medium-scale users. The objectives of this analysis are to evaluate the political economy of Zimbabwe's emerging land policy. The policy discussion on the economic implication of land acquisition has become misleading because the scale of land targeted has not been adequately conceptualised.
