Reconfigured Agrarian Relations in Zimbabwe

written by Toendepi Shonhe

Radical land reform programmes generate changes in agrarian structures and capital accumulation trajectories in the countryside. This book examines how capital accumulation is being reshaped by changing financing and marketing of agricultural commodities and presents an emerging Quadi-PMMR-model agrarian structure composed of the poor, middle, middle-to-rich peasants and some rich capitalists with a growing middle scale farmer base constituting two thirds of the rural population in Zimbabwe. This evidence based assessment, 15 years after the FTLRP, sheds light on policy outcomes and impacts on communities, revealing the changing production, marketing, capital accumulation and class formation tendencies across Zimbabwe’s settlement models and agro-ecological settings. The book fuses the reliance on agrarian political economy lenses and factor component analysis to reveal the dynamics of agrarian change and to explore the dialectic between production and circulation and between the centre and periphery in exceptional fashion that expands our understanding of Zimbabwe’s agrarian transition.

Toendepi Shonhe

Toendepi Shonhe is a political economist, and post-doctoral Researcher at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He attained a Masters in public policy management from the University of Witwatersrand, and holds a PhD in development studies attained from the University of KwaZulu Natal. His research interests are in agrarian relations, rural development and the commercialisation of agriculture.