In the early 2000s widespread farm takeovers occurred in Zimbabwe when Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government, led by veterans of the war of liberation, appropriated most of the white-owned commercial farms. By the late 1990s Zimbabwe’s rural farmland was still divided largely between two main blocks. These were communal areas, which housed most of the rural population (around 8 million at that stage) and were overcrowded and degraded, although small-scale black communal farmers still produced a large proportion of Zimbabwe’s maize and cotton crops.