In the Shadow of a Conflict: Crisis in Zimbabwe and its effects in Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia

4. Settling for Less? Zimbabwean Farmers and commercial farming in Mozambique

92 Introduction1 With the start of large-scale evictions on commercial farms in Zimbabwe from 2000 onwards, and a much wider series of political and economic crises, Mozambique’s Manica Province (hereafter referred to as Manica2 ) along the central-west border with Zimbabwe became a preferred site of relocation for a relatively small yet not insignificant group of displaced white commercial farmers and other ‘investors’ searching for a secure future.3 Even if it represented a somewhat circumscribed migratory ‘wave’ with mixed results, this uneven mix of displacees both faced and precipitated several changes and challenges in the various environments they came to occupy across the border from Zimbabwe. Their experiences of displacement, settlement and adaptation, and the responses of their differently positioned Mozambican hosts, have been documented in some detail elsewhere (Hammar, 2010). The present chapter revisits these issues, providing some updates as well as paying specific attention to the effects on the productivity of the farming community in Manica of the shifting policy environment in Mozambique. The chapter draws on a combination of primary and secondary data sources. The empirical material that informs the arguments outlined here is grounded in numerous fieldwork encounters in Mozambique during the 2000s. To begin with, between 2003 and 2005 I was engaged in monitoring and further developing a programme of Swedish support for transboundary water resources management in the Pungwe River Basin, which stretches from Zimbabwe’s eastern border to Mozambique’s coastal city of Beira. This required intermittent visits to the area and numerous interviews with, among others, Mozambican officials at national, provincial and district levels in agencies related to water, agriculture, mining, environment and so on; international development 4 Settling for Less? Zimbabwean Farmers and Commercial Farming in Mozambique Amanda Hammar 93 Settling for less? agencies; private companies; and a range of local Mozambican stakeholders including commercial farmers, traditional leaders, and rural and urban traders , as well as the newly arrived Zimbabwean commercial farmers. Given their ambitions to expand commercial agriculture in the region, the Zimbabweans were explicitly concerned with the availability, access and affordability of future water supplies. Even in those early days, they were making a visible mark in Manica. Their physical presence was evident not least in the increased number of farmers’ pick-up trucks on the roads, and the growth in bars, restaurants and accommodation in Chimoio established by or frequented by these Zimbabweans, but also in the raised demand for goods and services that was positively affecting local businesses. My contact with the farmers and the changes observed in the area more generally during the initial period of their arrival began to generate a set of questions that were not part of my formal terms of reference at the time and therefore could not be explored during those visits. However, between 2006 and 2009 I was able to conduct several periods of fieldwork in Manica (and some shorter ones in Zimbabwe) as the basis of an independent research project that focused explicitly on the context, experience and effects of displacement of these same white Zimbabwean commercial farmers in Mozambique.4 Although this research was initiated and located at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala as part of a larger programme I co-ordinated on Political Economies of Displacement, it dovetailed neatly with the aims of the ‘In the Shadow of a Conflict’ research programme that was being developed at Noragric. Thereafter it became integrated into and partly supported by that programme. The research included looking at the various ways in which these farmers reinvented themselves and developed new modes of living and livelihoods in Mozambique in a dramatically different social, cultural, political and economic environment from that which they had known previously. I was also interested in how their presence affected those amongst whom they had come to live, but equally how the terms set by Mozambican officialdom affected their possibilities for productive and settled lives. The present chapter is divided into two main sections that focus respectively on two phases of the Zimbabweans’ move to Manica: the initial period of exploration of the options they found there, in which new routes to an alternative future – or just a liveable present – were being tested; and a later period in which the weight of the challenges they had to confront – especially production challenges and business failures – would eventually lead many, though not all, of the migrant farmers to leave. In the Shadow of a...