"It can never be stressed enough that Zimbabwe inherited a highly unequal land ownership pattern from apartheid Rhodesia. By 2002, 70 percent of the richest farmland still remained in the hands of just 4,500 white commercial farmers, focused mainly on producing crops for export. Meanwhile, one million indigenous families eked out a bare existence, crowded into an arid region of limited suitability for agriculture, known as the ‘communal’ areas. Fast-track land reform redistributed much of the commercial farmland to some 170,000 families. Whatever its faults in execution, the process has undeniably created a significantly more equitable distribution of land than what prevailed before....
Despite a lack of infrastructure, beneficiaries were quick to take up farming operations. For instance, nearly 72 percent of those allocated land in 2002, the peak year of land resettlement, began operations that same year. This, despite resistance by evicted commercial landowners, and the refusal of many of them to vacate the land. By 2003, the percentage of these resettled farmers that had begun farming had risen to almost 96 percent, a far cry from the popular image of land going to waste."