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Water use by farmers in Zim: Part Four …the birth of ZINWA

WATER resource management in Zimbabwe continued to be governed by the 1976 Water Act, decades into independence.   The water reforms that culminated in the 1998 Water Act began as a direct reaction to the 1991/92 drought, the worst in the country’s history. The setting up...

Water use by farmers in Zim: Part Three  …dispossession of title over water

SETTLER-farmer-initiated furrow irrigation took place in Rhodesia with the help of missionaries, between 1912 and 1927.  To help white farmers further develop their irrigation schemes, the government of Rhodesia took over in 1928.  While they retained control of the irrigation schemes, the management of communal irrigation...

Water use by farmers in Zim: Part Two …the Water Act

THE South African connection had a strong influence on some aspects of water management in Rhodesia.   Here, the settlers, encouraged by the British South Africa Company (BSAC), used the Roman Dutch Law, brought from Holland and used in South Africa.  But this was regarded as...

Water use by farmers in Zim: Part One  …of water rights

WHILE it is an accepted fundamental that successful agricultural production depends on access to agricultural land, markets, affordable finance, appropriate technologies and adequate transport network, measures must be taken to protect society, especially the indigenous smallholder farmer. With an estimated 70 percent of Zimbabweans living...

A look at South Africa’s agricultural policy

AS in most countries around the world, agriculture in South Africa has a central role to play in building a strong economy and, in the process, reducing the apartheid-induced inequalities inherited from the past.   The goal of the policy was to increase incomes and...

Eris the COVID-19 variant …is Zimbabwe safe?

THE novel coronavirus and its variants and mutations has been with us for close to three years.  Although the pandemic has, by-and-large,  been controlled, the virus has, nonetheless, taken its toll on collective populations.  While its socio-economic, health and clinical impacts are still being felt...

Medicine, law and ethics: Part One …the law and underlying ethical assumptions

AS a young medical student in the US, I was also privileged to cover medical law — a relatively new addition to the academic curriculum.  The subject was enormously popular among the students and its journey from being a minor legal subject to a fully-fledged...

Global environmental governance: Part Three …need for logical and evidence-based strategies

THERE are now more opportunities within the provisions of IEL, for non-State actors to engage.  This was called for in Agenda 21, of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 3-14 1992. Section III of Agenda 21...

Global environmental governance:Part Two …problem of fragmentation

THE legal compartmentalisation, sometimes known as ‘fragmentation’, that is evident within public international law as a whole, also exists within the different subsets of international law and is clearly evident within the international environmental law (IEL).   It manifests in the large number of individual International...

Global environmental governance: Part One …opacity of international law

IN the field of environmental protection, the terms ‘environmental governance’ and ‘global environmental governance’ are used for a variety of purposes, which can lead to ambiguity.  The term ‘global environmental governance’ (GEG) has been used to describe the different regimes of International Environmental Law (IEL),...

African traditional medicine …environmentally-friendly healthcare

TRADITIONAL medicine is defined as: “The sum total of knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures that are used to maintain health, as well as to prevent, diagnose, improve or treat physical and mental illnesses.”  In Africa, the...

Agroecology: Beyond farm boundaries – Part One …understanding the discipline

WITH the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) painting a dire picture of the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, there is a growing urgency over the ecological crisis and increasing evidence that our socio-economic systems are fundamentally undermining the functioning of the natural world...

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