ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on the rationale for structural reform as an ideal development strategy. It highlights the realities of the Lancaster agreement and macroeconomic constraints, which circumvented Government capacity to attend to the structural roots of an evolving national agrarian crisis. The country's leaders eventually courted the neo-liberal policy agenda and committed the fatal mistake of liberalising the economy before resolving its potential to spawn a stagflation spiral and greater mass impoverishment. In Zimbabwe, any development strategy worth its salt needed to resolve the national land question. In March 1981, the Zimbabwe Conference on Reconstruction and Development [ZIMCORD] attended by forty-five nations, fifteen UN agencies and ten aid societies, marked the re-opening of links with the world economy, which the IMF affirmed the following month through release of a 'honeymoon' tranche of US$37.5 million. In reality, the land program had succumbed to macroeconomic difficulties, dependency on the large-scale sector and both black and white ruling class interests.
