Zimbabwe white farmers seek $1.2m for welfare: union

By MacDonald Dzirutwe

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's white farmers union said on Friday it needed to raise $1.2 million each month to look after more than 4,000 members it said had been impoverished by President Robert Mugabe's often violent land seizure drive.

The Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) said violence against white farmers still remaining on farms was escalating and that efforts to engage the government had failed, and warned of a failed 2009/10 cropping season.

Mugabe formed a unity government with longtime rival Morgan Tsvangirai, now prime minister, but the coalition has been at odds over how to share power and the CFU said the new government was not protecting them.

CFU deputy president Charles Taffs said 150 farmers were being prosecuted in the courts for refusing to make way for new black farmers.

The CFU now has less than 400 active farmers, down from more than 5,000 when the seizures started in 2000.

"We are actively now trying to raise $1.2 million every month to look after the 4,200 people who are currently facing total destitution," Taffs told journalists.

The land issue is emotive in Zimbabwe, where white commercial farmers used to own 70 percent of the country's fertile land, thanks to a colonial system that drove blacks from their ancestral lands.

Since the land seizures, which Mugabe argues are necessary to correct colonial land imbalances, 90 percent of the land is now in the hands of black farmers, but who lack proper commercial farming skills and are without adequate inputs.