Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change party says it won’t return farms seized from white owners by President Robert Mugabe if it leads the government.

An MDC government would ask the international community and multilateral lenders to help compensate farmers whose farms were confiscated by Mugabe’s government since 2000, the opposition party said in an e-mailed statement today.

Zimbabwe has been in political crisis since March 29 elections, in which the MDC won control of the lower house of parliament. Mugabe extended his 28-year rule in a June 27 presidential runoff ballot in which he was the sole candidate after MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew, citing violence against his supporters. The two sides are holding talks in neighboring South Africa aimed at ending the dispute.

Land reform policies since 2000 have been “chaotic and outside the rule of law,” the MDC said. “That being the case, the MDC must rationalize the situation by ensuring that there will be no return to the pre-2000 status nor will the present regime of wastage, corruption, under-utilization and multiple ownership be preserved.”

The party will set up a Land Commission to audit properties and establish a “one man, one farm” policy to end multiple ownership of farms.

Should the MDC gain control of Zimbabwe’s government, it will also end the corn and wheat trading monopoly held by the state-owned Grain Marketing Board, it said. That would end state subsidies of corn, Zimbabwe’s staple food.

“The GMB will remain a part of central government but will be required to operate on commercial principles and will no longer hold a statutory monopoly over grain and oilseed marketing,” it said.

Zimbabwe has faced shortages of basic commodities such as flour and sugar following the seizure of commercial farmland to give to black subsistence farmers. The southern African nation has an official inflation rate of 2.2 million percent, the highest in the world.