ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the implications of changing agrarian discourses and practices for food sovereignty prospects in Zimbabwe. While the literature on the implications of the shift in land discourses and practices under the “new dispensation” abounds, such literature has blind spots in relation to implications of the shifts for the national food sovereignty agenda. This chapter closes this gap. Drawing on secondary sources and underpinned by an exploratory research design, this chapter reviews both academic and grey literature databases using food sovereignty, neoliberalism, “Zimbabwe is open for business,” monopoly finance capital, land reform, and sovereignty as key terms. Predicated on the Food Sovereignty Framework, this chapter conducts a comparative analysis of two periods: the FTLRP (2000–2017) and the “new dispensation” (post-November 2017). It finds that the switch to “neoliberalism” by the new regime undermines the country's societal dialectic, relational, and interactive features that should combine to make food sovereignty conceivable. This chapter concludes that pro-capital land policies will shatter down, not only the accumulation potential of indigenous people but also compromises the country's food sovereignty agenda.
