The social impact of structural adjustment programmes on the smallholder irrigation farmers in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s agriculture is currently divided into two sub-sectors: large-scale commercial farms (4,500 of them, occupying 10 million hectares of prime agricultural land), and smallholder communal farms (850,000 in number, occupying low agricultural potential areas) (Rukuni, 1994: 15). More than 75 percent of the entire population lives in rural or communal areas where a majority of the people are at the mercy of erratic rainfall patterns and poor market organization to secure their livelihoods.