Last week I was in Glasgow at COP26, shuttling between events in the Blue Zone and the fringe across the city. It was overwhelming, with a cacophony of conflicting voices and views. The first week including a flood of announcements … Continue reading → …
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ZimbabweLand
Zimbabwe’s bumper harvest: what explains the success?
As farmers turn to the next season with the beginning of the rains, the country is in a good position having reaped a bumper harvest in 2020/21. An estimated 2.7 million tonnes of maize were produced, triple the amount in … Continue reading → …
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Biodiversity and climate change: why tree planting schemes may not be the answer
The first phase of the delayed Biodiversity Convention of the Parties (COP15) ended last week. There has been much talk of linking the twin crises of biodiversity and the climate. Grand plans for protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 … Continue reading → …
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The politics of control in Zimbabwe’s COVID times
The COVID-19 situation in Zimbabwe has improved since our last report, with infection rates and deaths declining in all areas. The alert level has been reduced to Level 2, with restrictions relaxed. At the same time, the vaccination drive has … Continue reading → …
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Challenging simplistic land degradation and restoration narratives in Zimbabwe
In the last blog, I reviewed the results of our land use analysis using a combination of Landsat satellite imagery, document/archival analysis and field interviews from Mvurwi area in northern Zimbabwe from 1984 to 2018, now out as an APRA … Continue reading → …
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Dynamic drivers of land use change in Zimbabwe
What are the drivers of land use change and how do they interact over time? Are the changes, uni-directional and linear, or are the dynamics more complex? This is the question we posed for our study site in Mvurwi in … Continue reading → …
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Worker-peasants and peasant-workers: new labour regimes in rural Zimbabwe
Much academic debate about rural farm labour has focused on the idea of linear transitions in labour regimes through processes of agricultural commercialisation. This sees farmworkers as either moving towards a class of wage-labour, profiting from modernising, efficient, large-scale agricultural … Continue reading → …
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COVID-19 spreads to rural Zimbabwe
The third COVID-19 wave has firmly arrived in Zimbabwe’s rural areas. This is no longer the ‘rich person’s disease’ of those based in town. The number of cases and sadly deaths has surged across our rural study areas in the … Continue reading → …
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Land reform in England?
Access to land is not only a concern in places like Zimbabwe. In England, less than 1% of the population own half the land and 92% of land is out of bounds for ordinary people. The skewed nature of land … Continue reading → …
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How is ‘China’ helping to transform ‘Africa’? The need for a more sophisticated debate
How is China helping to transform African economies? There are many different narratives cast around in public and policy debate: China as the new imperial power, China as the radical developmentalist, China as just like any other donor/foreign power. None … Continue reading → …
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