Archival Significance
Written by D. R. Norman during the same years he served as Zimbabwe’s Minister of Agriculture (1980 to 1985), and previously headed the Commercial Farmers’ Union. A rare case where the author was also the government official responsible for the policies the paper evaluates, covering the exact five-year window of his own tenure.
Institutional Context
Published as Occasional Paper No. 1 by the Food and Agricultural Research Mission (FARM), part of a series aimed at agricultural policy audiences in the early postindependence period.
Content Summary
Assesses the marketed output and productivity gains of Zimbabwe’s peasant and communal farming sector in the first five years after independence, a period often referred to at the time as the country’s ‘peasant miracle’.
Research Utility
A primary source for agricultural historians and economists studying Zimbabwe’s early postindependence land and agricultural policy. Best read alongside later academic reassessments questioning how evenly that growth was actually distributed across regions and farmers.
Abantu Archives Note
Held in-house.