White Farmers Ordered to Down Tools

Up to 3,000 white farmers in Zimbabwe will be told to stop farming at midnight tonight as Harare steps up its land seizure and redistribution programme.

But the deadline has come in the middle of the winter wheat growing season - and threatens much of that crop on productive commercial farms ahead of what the World Food Programme (WFP) believes is an impending food crisis in the country.

Jenni Williams, a spokesman for the Commercial Farmers Union in Zimbabwe, said many farmers would defy the order rather than see their crops rot in the fields.

"It is extremely tense. There is an atmosphere of confusion, disbelief and defiance among those who have crops in," she said.

The deadline under amended land seizure laws ordered the white farmers to cease commercial operations by midnight and leave their homes by August 8.

Farmers who disobey face a fine or a jail sentence of up to two years.

A combination of dry weather and land reform leading to disruptions of the commercial farms - which are about five times more productive than small scale farms - has left Zimbabwe's wheat stocks at dangerously low levels.

The WFP estimates that nearly half the country's 12.5 million people will need food assistance this year.

Since June 2000, the Harare government has targeted 5,872 mostly white-owned properties - confiscating 25m acres - but despite promises to give the land to poor blacks many of the farms have been given to President Robert Mugabe's loyalists.

Whites make up less than 1% of Zimbabwe's population, but until the recent land seizures they owned about one third of the nation's productive farmland.