Since November, 19 white farmers who lost ownership of their land have been granted 99-year government-backed leases on resettled farms.

"We wanted to come back because it's home, " said one man on his 100-hectare farm outside the capital, Harare, where he is planning to grow maize and tobacco. "Farming has been in my family for generations. We're just happy to be back on the land."

There are only about 600 white farmers left in Zimbabwe, down from 4,500 in 1999. That was the year Mugabe was defeated in a referendum; from 2000 the government decided to "fast-track" land reform in an effort to win over a hostile electorate, resulting in farm seizures by supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF party who claimed to be landless veterans of the country's war for independence. Dozens of white farmers and black farm workers were killed in violent land seizures.

In July 2005 Mugabe declared that his land reform policy would only be complete when there was "not a single white on the farms". But a contracting economy, hyperinflation and severe food shortages have forced the authorities to allow some interested whites to return. The land minister, Flora Buka, said the government had received over 200 applications so far from whites to take up farming again.

"It is a radical change of policy at this stage, but the future remains to be seen, " said Eric Bloch, a Bulawayo-based economic adviser. "Are there going to be 19 token whites, or will the government continue?"

The need for land reform after independence in 1980 was generally acknowledged, even by the commercial farming sector, as a necessary reversal of British colonial-era injustices, when whites were given the best arable land at the expense of landless blacks. But many expropriated farms were given to political allies, often ending up in the hands of cabinet ministers, while many poor black farmers, in whose name the land reform was carried out, were left to fend for themselves.

Stranded without capital and fertiliser, and hit by persistent drought, many of the new farmers failed to use the land productively, transforming Zimbabwe from the former bread-basket of southern Africa into a net food importer, and sending inflation soaring. The government has issued 275 leases so far in a bid to boost food production, but nearly two million Zimbabweans will need food aid in the next six months, despite improved agricultural output last season, according to the UN-backed World Food Programme.

"Farming is dead in the water, " said John Robertson, a political analyst. "The banks won't accept the farms as collateral, and farmers can be removed within 90 days if they fail to comply with government requirements.

It's a patronage system."

There is no sign that Mugabe is easing his grip on power. Zanu-PF is about to postpone the 2008 presidential election until parliamentary elections in 2010, officially as a "cost-saving measure". But a senior loyalist has suggested he should be made president for life.

Opening the annual Zanu-PF conference on Friday, Mugabe vowed that his country would not collapse in the face of western pressure and "illegal" sanctions. "I know we are in difficult times, it's hard times that we are going through, " he told 3,000 cheering delegates.

"You are bearing a fair share of the burden . . . we know that. [But] Zimbabwe will never collapse."

Inflation, however, has now touched 1,100%, and it may be too late to persuade more than a handful of white farmers to return. "A lot of the whites, like other Zimbabweans, just gave up and emigrated, " said a man who lost his farm in 2001. "Now you have white Zimbabweans farming in Zambia, South Africa and even Nigeria. Others went to the UK or Australia . . . and most will not come back."