And yet today, mountains of food are rotting in fields and storerooms. The farm workers who once cultivated the fields and harvested the crops have been driven from the farms. Thousands have been threatened, beaten and tortured. Many are now forced to live a hand to mouth existence, reliant on the support of their poor communities.
Behind this devastation lies a programme of so called 'land reform' introduced by the government of Robert Mugabe.
The authorities claim that this reform programme is redistributing the farms among the people of Zimbabwe. But Amnesty International believes it is a corrupt and violent system that's taking the farms by force and giving them to Mugabe's Zanu PF party members and their cronies.
In the process, hundreds of thousands of farm workers have been forced out of their homes - many of them having been savagely beaten.
Leading the movement to defend the farm workers is a woman named Gertrude Hambira.
Gertude is the general secretary of the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ). She and her fellow union leaders have monitored and recorded widespread human rights abuses carried out in the name of the land reform.
This work has placed her in almost constant danger. She has been repeatedly harassed, intimidated, arrested and beaten by the Zimbabwean police. And in February 2010 she finally had to flee the home and country she loves in fear of losing her freedom, leaving behind her elderly mother, family and friends. This was a result of her union publishing a report and a film - The House of Justice - documenting the forced evictions and violence faced by her members.
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The brutal truth about Zimbabwe's land reforms: 'House of Justice'
This film was made in 2009 by the General Agricultural and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) to highlight the plight of Zimbabwean farm workers. Gertrude Hambira, the union's general secretary, had this to say about the film:
'I made the film to give a voice to the voiceless and to show the world what is really happening in Zimbabwe. The government has set up a youth militia made up of young unemployed people from rural areas who are sent to invade farms. They start to harass the workers, forcing them to attend their meetings. If the workers refuse to obey them they harass them, tie them to trees to beat them, force their children to watch the torture they inflict on them. And if we call the police for help, they simply look on without doing anything.'
Find out more:
The International Trade Union Federation ITUC, publish an Annual Survey of Labour Rights Violations, you can read the Zimbabwe chapter here.
Click here to visit the LabourStart Zimbabwe page full of trade union news reports in English.