Mugabe now targeting all white farms

The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, has warned that his government intends eventually to take over all the white-owned land in the country.

Speaking to election candidates from his governing ZANU-PF party, Mr Mugabe said the nation should be grateful to the war veterans who've invaded hundreds of farms.

He said that, if white farmers kept land in the future, it would be out of charity not as a legacy of colonialism.

The government last week published a list of more than eight-hundred white-owned farms that it plans to take over.

A BBC correspondent in Zimbabwe says Mr Mugabe's speech seems like a call to arms for the general elections due in less than three weeks. The leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai, accused the president of threatening commercial agriculture in Zimbabwe, which, he said, was irrational.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service