From social to environmental injustice, the impact of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in Chiredzi District.

Abstract

In the early 2000s, Zimbabwe embarked on the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) with a primary objective of correcting historical injustice of access to land. The programme entailed redistributing white-owned farms to black farmers under subsistence A1 and commercial A2 scheme. This paper discusses the ways in which the FTLRP addressed issues relating to environmental justice (EJ) in the A1 farms of Chiredzi district. While FTLRP is applauded for ushering in a racially just society with equal access to land, research findings suggest that the programme had not fully addressed questions of EJ. A combination of environmental factors such as climate variability as well as institutional and technical logistics for the effective management of land transition from white-owned to black-owned farms were not instituted, which negatively compromised the preparedness of the majority of small-scale black farmers to take on the massive responsibility of addressing environmental burdens. It is thus recommended, that there is an urgent need to rethink and redesign the FTLRP so as to embed in its implementation broader attributes of social and environmental justice. Such an approach will facilitate the establishment of systems and mechanisms through which skills development and knowledge transfer on natural resource use can be fostered to bring about sustainable development