When 40 settlers were moved on to Don Miller's 1,100 hectare (2,700 acre) farm in Tengwe in northeast Zimbabwe, they found an efficiently run agricultural unit. All they had to do was to carry on what he had been doing.

There were 31 large flue-curing tobacco barns that processed 120,000kg of high quality flavour tobacco a year, ploughed, fertilised fields that yielded 1,200 tonnes of maize and several tonnes of paprika, pasture for 200 cattle, six 50-metre runs for 15,000 hens that produced eggs for all the hotels on the resort town on the shores of Lake Kariba and a fledgling crocodile-breeding programme. The family were driven off in November 2000, in the first year of President Mugabe's lawless, violent “revolutionary land resettlement programme” and 60 skilled farmworkers were also chased away.

Eight years later the settlers, peasant farmers, are still in place. Two grow perhaps 1,000 kg of low-grade tobacco annually. Fewer than half manage between them to produce a subsistence maize crop of maybe ten tonnes. Outbuildings have been vandalised and in many cases entire buildings have lost every brick, for the settlers to build their own rough houses. There is no electricity, the high-voltage cables bringing power on to the property having been stolen, and no water as the borehole pumps have been pulled up and sold.

“They are not commercial farmers,” said Mr Miller. “They don't have the skills for commercial agriculture, so they carried on with what they know, susbsistence farming. The government funding for resettled farmers was grabbed by the cheffes [ruling party bigwigs] so they got nothing. And they lack ambition.”

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