President Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, which has mounted a six-year campaign to seize white-owned farms, is beginning to allow some white farmers to return to their land as the country faces starvation and economic collapse.

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," one farmer told The Independent on Sunday 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 Mr 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 Mr 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 more than 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 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, 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."

There is no sign that Mr Mugabe is preparing to ease 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 that he should be made president for life.

Opening the annual Zanu-PF conference on Friday, this year entitled "Consolidating Independence through Land Reform", Mr Mugabe vowed that his country would not collapse in the face of Western pressure and "illegal" sanctions. "I know we are in difficult times... [But] Zimbabwe will never collapse," he told 3,000 cheering delegates.

Inflation, however, has now touched 1,100 per cent, and it may be too late to persuade more than a handful of white farmers to return. "A lot of the whites just gave up and emigrated out of the country," 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."

Hoogstraten began to suspect that the crew intended to make a film that would show Zimbabwe's crisis, especially state torture and human rights abuses. He said he discovered notes left by the journalists in his car which showed they planned to interview government critics. Hoogstraten had the team confined to a hotel room and threatened to have them jailed, said the Zimbabwean press. He tried to force Lynch to sign a statement admitting they double-crossed him.

'I told Shamuyarira they were crooks. They were put under house arrest. If I had had my way, we would have made a case out of it and put them in prison, because they were here with evil in their hearts,' he told the Zimbabwe Independent. A spokesman for Channel 4, Howard Needleman, said the crew managed to fly out of Zimbabwe last week. Hoogstraten said the team signed a contract agreeing not to report on Zimbabwe's land seizures, the Matabeleland massacres, when an estimated 20,000 people died in the 1980s, or mass housing demolitions last year. The government agreed to allow the men into Zimbabwe to produce an upbeat documentary. 'The government agreed they should come, but I said I must control their product,' Hoogstraten told the Zimbabwe Independent. 'I told them that, if they stepped out of line, I would deal with them personally.'

Yesterday the Zanu-PF party backed a plan to extend Mugabe's rule by two years, a step critics say would plunge the country deeper into crisis. The main opposition has condemned the plan as the work of a dictatorship and says Mugabe, now 82, who has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980, has nothing more to offer the country.

Jimmy Guerin, brother of the murdered reporter Veronica Guerin, recognises the need for police on the streets, but says the reason for the feud is apparent in Dublin's bars and restaurants.

'I had been in this pub at a Christmas party near Phoenix Park. When I went to the toilet I saw three men at the same party snorting cocaine. They were all perfectly respectable young professionals who thought nothing of taking coke for social and recreational use,' he said. 'These are the people who are fuelling the drugs boom and making these gangsters very, very rich. There are only a couple of thousand registered heroin addicts in Dublin; there are hundreds of thousands of social users of drugs, particularly cocaine.'

Guerin contrasts the fortunes of the Dublin drug gangs of 2006 to the handful of dealers that his sister died exposing a decade ago. 'John Gilligan (the man whose gang were behind Veronica's death) and his team were earning around an estimated €25m (£16.8m) when she was killed. That was 10 years ago and today those figures would be far higher. There are dealers in this town earning up to €2m (£1.3m) a week, mainly from cocaine.'

The fate of another Dublin drug dealer, Martin 'Marlo' Hyland, illustrates the volatility of the city's new underworld. Hyland was shot four times in the head while he slept upstairs in his niece's house at Scribblestown Park, Finglas, last Tuesday morning. The 39-year-old dealer had been moving from house to house following a warning that his life was in danger. The street-wise career criminal ran a 10-man-strong gang of young, hardened drug dealers.

Detectives investigating his assassination believe that he was betrayed by at least two of his associates and the reason was simple - greed. 'They simply wanted to take over his operations,' said a senior Garda detective.

'Marlo had built up a vast empire on the northside that stretched from Finglas right over to Coolock. He was making huge profits, and somebody on the inside of the gang wanted more. They had killed other dealers in Finglas who were lowering their prices and getting in their way.'

The ruthless nature of the gang warfare that involves at least three separate feuds across the city was later demonstrated when Marlo's killers shot dead a 20-year old plumber, Anthony Campbell, as he worked on a radiator at the same house.

The plumber had no connections to Marlo or any other criminal boss. Anthony Campbell was targeted in all likelihood because he might have identified the unmasked hit team.

The Garda has scored some successes against organised crime in the city over the last 12 months. Thanks to Operation Oak and Operation Anvil - two major drives against the underworld - 2006 saw a record number of drugs seizures in the Irish Republic.

But those working with drug addicts in Dublin say that at no time in the year did the price of drugs rise as a result of a choking off of the supply.

Another worrying development is the use of bombs, which are being manufactured in Dundalk by former Provisional IRA and dissident republican explosives experts, and then sold on to various gangs.

Joe Costelloe represents the north inner city for the Labour Party, a constituency where many of the murders have taken place. He says that gangland killings have the lowest detection rate of any crime - just 15 per cent.

'There is a big incentive for young hitmen, many of them with drug habits themselves to fund, to go on killing. There is big money for a hit. Then there is the knowledge, which the detection figures show, that you are likely to get away with it,' he said.

Hutton's attack follows complaints from a number of Labour MPs that the influx of eastern Europeans following EU expansion two years ago has undercut wages and cost jobs among British-born workers, particularly in industries such as construction, where Polish plumbers and carpenters have proved both cheap and popular with householders.

Such fears led in part to the Home Secretary's recent decision to restrict the right to work in Britain for Romanians and Bulgarians, who join the EU formally in January.

Ministers say privately there is no evidence that recent rises in unemployment are directly linked to the arrival of eastern Europeans. But Hutton will argue that, in future, homegrown benefit claimants who are reluctant to work will be left behind by foreigners eager for jobs.

In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research tomorrow, Hutton will say the major problem holding people back in 1997 was lack of jobs, but that, since then, things have changed: 'We are in the middle of the longest period of economic growth for hundreds of years and there are about 600,000 vacancies across Britain. But there are still 900,000 people on jobseekers' allowance, and more than two thirds of claims are made by people who have claimed before.'

Of these, 12 per cent had spent six of the past seven years on benefits, 'so the next challenge we face is to ensure the hard core of "can work but won't work" benefit claimants take advantage of the opportunities out there and compete for jobs alongside growing numbers of migrants who arrive in Britain specifically to look for work rather than settle for the long term'.

Ministers argue that, unlike the immigrants of the Sixties and Seventies who came to Britain primarily to live, many eastern Europeans come to work for a few years with the intention of making enough money to enjoy a better standard of living when they return home.

While here, they are motivated to work long hours in jobs Britons do not necessarily want: they cannot claim benefits in the same way as naturalised Britons, and their rates of employment are well over the 80 per cent target set by the Chancellor for the British population.

The review is expected to be completed within months, and Hutton is said to be 'open-minded' about where it might lead.

He has not ruled out tougher sanctions such as withdrawal of benefits for those judged not actively to be seeking work.

The change of rhetoric may spark comparisons with Norman Tebbit's famous 'on your bike' exhortation to the unemployed to find work, and is likely to upset some Labour MPs. However aides insist the intention is not to 'do a Tebbit': instead the review is seen as following on from the reform of incapacity benefits now going through Parliament.

That review will look not just at jobseekers' allowance claimants but at other forms of benefit and will examine how getting more people into work could contribute to government targets to reduce child poverty.

The move follows Iain Duncan Smith's report for the Conservative party on the causes of poverty last week, and comes ahead of separate Liberal Democrat proposals this week to tackle poverty by making work pay.