Zimbabwe?s ruling ZANU-PF party has pushed controversial land law amendments through parliament making it easier to seize white-owned farms for blacks, the official Herald newspaper reported.

The move, made possible by the parliamentary majority wielded by President Robert Mugabe?s party, overrides objections from a legal committee that the changes were unconstitutional. The government says the amendments will ?consolidate the gains of land reform and remove bottlenecks in land acquisition?.

A major amendment in the bill ? which will become law once Mugabe signs it ? is the abolition of a requirement that the initial notice of acquisition should be served personally upon the owner of the land to be acquired.

A parliamentary legal committee whose views are normally taken on board by the government had condemned as unconstitutional the amendment?s proposal that acquisition notices would now only be published in a government gazette.

The legal committee is currently chaired by an opposition legislator, and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation said the bill had been approved despite fierce objections by members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

ZANU-PF holds just under two-thirds of the 150 seats in parliament, of which 30 are occupied by presidential appointees and traditional chiefs.

Government critics accuse Mugabe of plunging one of Africa?s potentially richest countries into political and economic crisis through controversial policies, including the redistribution of hundreds of white-owned farms to landless blacks.

Thousands of peasants have benefited from the programme in the last three years, but critics say the most productive farms were seized by government ministers and ZANU-PF officials.