Above photo: 2022 protest against sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe. Xinhua.
For over two decades, US-led sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe in retaliation to its land reforms have tolled the toiling farmers and workers of the southern African country.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has condemned the US-imposed unilateral sanctions on Zimbabwe as “illegal” and a violation of the “basic human rights of ordinary Zimbabweans”. It has also once again called for their “immediate and unconditional removal.”
The regional intergovernmental organization with 16 member states has been observing every October 25 as the SADC Anti-Sanctions Day, after the date was thus designated by the heads of the SADC states at its 39th Summit in August 2019.
“These sanctions have not only affected the people of Zimbabwe and their Government, but the entire region. It is like a human body, when you chop one of its parts, it affects the whole body,” the late John Magufuli had said in his address in 2019. Magufuli at the time was the president of Tanzania and became the new chairperson of SADC at that summit.
Earlier in August this year, the rotating chair of SADC passed to Zimbabwe. Its president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, launched and signed a digital petition which was submitted to the US embassy on Friday, October 25, at an event organized to mark the day in Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, Bulawayo. Once an industrial hub, the city has been de-industrialized by the sanctions now running for over two decades, leaving its economy in tatters.
On October 25, as the Anti-Sanctions Day activities were underway, the US Embassy placed an ad through Google on the state-owned Zimpapers’ news websites reading: “It’s corruption, not sanctions.”
The US has been blaming endogenous factors for Zimbabwe’s crippled economy, refuting the role of its sanctions, ever since imposing them on Zimbabwe on the heels of the radical land reforms in 2000. Until then, less than 5,000 White colonial settlers controlled most of Zimbabwe’s prime arable land, even 20 years after independence from Britain.
They used it to rear cattle for beef or grow cash crops, both “for export, with very little contribution to the national granary,” recollected Oliat Mavuramba, the central cluster coordinator of the Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers Forum (ZIMSOFF). In 2000, mass direct actions led by veterans of the national liberation war under the watch of the then president Robert Mugabe seized these lands and “redistributed them among the over a million smallholder farmers.”
Sanctions To Derail Land Reforms
The US retaliated with sanctions restricting Zimbabwe’s credit access from international financial institutions by passing the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) in 2001 – amended in 2018 to increase its stringency.
The first condition set out in the Act for the lifting of this restriction is the “Restoration of the Rule of Law”, starting with “respect for ownership and title of property”, requiring the state to pay and resettle the colonial settlers who had monopolized land before redistribution. Oliat, however, maintains that colonial settlers never owned but “stole” the land, which was returned to its “rightful owners”, i.e. Zimbabwe’s small farmers, in the course of the land reforms.
“Derailing the potential success of land reforms is itself the main goal of the sanctions,” he told Peoples Dispatch. “The sanctions have attacked the economic engine of Zimbabwe i.e. agricultural production.”
Cut off from export markets in Europe and UK – which along with Canada and Australia followed the US with sanctions of their own – the once thriving horticulture industry collapsed. Its contribution to its GDP fell from the 4.5% prior sanctions to 0.8% in less than two decades.
Unable to access credit or attract investment under sanctions, Zimbabwe struggled to fund the modernization of its agriculture. The cost of inputs like seeds and fertilizers soared due to dwindling supply as production plants fell into dilapidation in the absence of funds for repair and maintenance.
As manufacturing industries struggled to retool, the number of functioning tractors in the country less than halved, dropping “from 14,000 before sanctions to 6,000 [by 2019] against a national requirement of 40,000 units,” according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. As infrastructure began to crumble, land area covered under irrigation schemes declined.
These factors increased the burden of investment on the smallholder farmers, but they were unable to access credit, Oliat complained. The main agricultural bank was crippled with direct sanctions for over a decade, after the then US President George Bush passed an Executive Order in 2003, “declaring a national emergency to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to US foreign policy posed by” Zimbabwe. The list of government entities and officials placed under the sanctions by this order was expanded twice with fresh orders in 2005 and 2008.
Over 610,000 workers were victims of closures and retrenchments between 2005 and 2020, especially in the sectors of agriculture, mining and manufacturing whose public entities were sanctioned, reported Alena Douhan, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights.
With unemployment in the formal sector reaching an estimated 94% by 2008, a reverse migration from urban to rural areas unfolded. As workers returning to villages sought informal jobs on farms, the pressure on land to provide livelihood increased further.
Despite these adversities, most members of ZIMSOFF, formed in 2002 at the start of these sanctions, have managed to increase productivity of the plots of land they acquired during the reforms by adopting agroecological and sustainable farming practices, Oliat said. These include harvesting water and preparing manure locally, and diversifying livestock and food crops to include small grains like millet and sorghum that are better suited for the environment.
The plots of land best developed by such practices have been dubbed “centers of excellence”, which serve as a “living demonstration” of the “local solutions to fight the embargo and climate crisis.” However, he admits, “productivity has remained an issue” in agriculture on which 60-70% of Zimbabwe’s population depend for their livelihoods that are being “squeezed by the embargo.”
US Undermines Zimbabweans’ Right To Food
Following an official visit in 2019, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, expressed concern in her report “about the negative impacts of the economic sanctions… on the overall civilian population, particularly on the right to food.”
The sanctions “also contribute to the deterioration of the water and sanitation infrastructure, resulting in the reduced accessibility of clean water and sanitation services for the majority of the population,” states Douhan’s report in 2022. She adds that “access to basic rights, including to life, food, water and sanitation, health and education” have all been “adversely” impacted by the sanctions which have “decimated the economic performance of the country.”
In an apparent attempt to seek relief from this crisis by convincing the US to lift these sanctions, the government, led by President Mnangagwa who had replaced Mugabe in a coup in 2017, gazetted a controversial new legislation in 2020. This allowed the few thousand colonial white settlers that had monopolized the land that was seized and redistributed in 2000 and 2001 to seek repossession or monetary compensation. The government is coughing up hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for each of the several hundred applications it has approved.
Amid these developments, in March this year, US President Joe Biden passed an Executive Order (EO) to terminate the “national emergency” declared over two decades ago with the EO in 2003, along with the two subsequent orders expanding the sanctions in 2005 and 2008.
The termination of these sanctions under national emergency was followed that very day by a fresh set of sanctions by the Treasury. Smaller in scope, it designates three Zimbabwean entities dealing with agrochemicals, construction, energy, logistics etc, along with 11 individuals, including President Mnangagwa, under the so-called Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
“The changes we are making today are intended to make clear what has always been true: our sanctions are not intended to target the people of Zimbabwe. Today we are refocusing our sanctions on clear and specific targets,” claimed Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.
Oliat, however, argues it was never true that the sanctions were targeted, adding that even today, it is the masses of Zimbabwean workers and farmers who suffer the most. ZIDERA, imposed in 2001 before the national emergency declaration terminated in March, remains in place, and continues to burden the smallholder farmers, who still “cannot access loans from the banks using their land as collateral.”
“But ZIDERA is not a sanction,” maintains Larry Socha, Public Affairs Officer of the US embassy in Zimbabwe, contradicting not only the farmer leaders of Zimbabwe, its government and the UN, but also the text of the Act itself, which used the words “economic sanctions”.
Gathering hundreds of its members from provinces including the Manicaland, Mashonaland and Matabeleland, ZIMSOFF organized an awareness campaign about the impact of the continuing sanctions at an event in the Masvingo district on October 17, ahead of the SADC Anti-Sanctions Day on October 25.
“Our region enjoys relative peace and stability and continues to work towards achieving a prosperous and integrated region… The imposition of sanctions undermines our collective efforts towards regional integration and sustainable development,” said Mnangagwa in his address as the SADC chairperson on the Anti-Sanctions Day.
“May this message transcend our borders and reach the ears and rattle the conscience of those perpetuating these cruel sanctions. They must realize the extent of harm their reprehensible actions inflict on the generality of the people of Zimbabwe, on the SADC region, and Africa, at large.”
The African Union (AU) “aligns fully with the position of SADC on the issue”, said its Commission’s chairperson, Moussa Faki, renewing AU’s call “for the immediate and unconditional lifting of all remaining sanctions.”