The literature on contract farming and climate change in Zimbabwe has blind spots in relation to the study of contract farming as a climate change response. While the literature on contract farming and climate change abounds, such literature is lacking when it comes to the exploration of how contract farming can facilitate climate change coping and adaptation strategies by smallholder farmers. This paper fills this gap. It draws on in-depth interviews with 10 contracted and 10 non-contract farmers who were engaged through face-to-face in-depth interviews in the Chipinge South Constituency. It found that contract farming does not only boost productivity, but it also enables farmers to positively respond to the ravages of climate change, and therefore, it should be supported and encouraged. Future research should explore more viable and sustainable way through which the state, instead of private sector actors, should be at the centre of contract farming.

The newly discovered coronavirus (COVID-19) has disrupted traditional methods of conducting research, particularly qualitative research. However, there remains a number of methods by which qualitative data can still be collected. These include the use of digital voice, video, and text-based tools, online surveys, and content analysis. Text-based sources can help to overcome the limitations of time and space, and also can be cost-effective. This chapter draws from data collected from 12 participants across Zimbabwe and demonstrates how these tools can be used to generate data or to sample data that is already available to satisfy research questions and meet research objectives. It recommends researchers to experiment with new ways of collecting qualitative data while also observing safety protocols and ethical considerations.

The analyses of the socio-economic consequences of the 2000s land redistribution in Zimbabwe have always been biased towards the analyses of the ‘production’ and ‘redistributive’ aspects while other equally important features such as ‘social cohesion’, ‘cooperation’, ‘protection’, and ‘accumulation’ amongst beneficiaries are neglected. Using the Sangwe farm in Chiredzi as a case study, this article departs from the conventional use of the political economy, sustainable livelihoods, human rights-based and neo-patrimonial approaches. It experiments with the transformative social policy approach positing that this approach includes the features which are ignored in dominant analyses. Using both quantitative and qualitative data in an exploratory research design, the article shows that viewed from this social policy perspective, the 2000s land reform was not a mere resounding success nor was it a complete disaster. The programme actually produced mixed results. There is therefore, the need to deploy eclectic approaches in the analysis of its consequences.

The article revisits previous viruses such as Ebola to extrapolate the socio-economic implications of the COVID-19. Using secondary sources and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) to guide understanding, the article argues that unless measures are put in place to safeguard smallholder activities in Zimbabwe, COVID-19 has the potential to reproduce the same catastrophic implications created by Ebola in West African countries where peasant food systems where shattered and livelihoods strategies maimed. With a perceptible withdrawal of the government from small-scale farming towards large-scale capital intensive operations, smallholders could now be even more vulnerable. The article concludes that social assistance should now be intensified to protect its vulnerable population from the ravages of COVID-19.