Good progress is being made in establishing a ”special-purpose vehicle” (SPV) to speed up and ensure effective land reform, Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana said on Tuesday.
Briefing the media after a meeting of the presidential commercial-agriculture working group at Tuynhuys, Xingwana said the matter was still under discussion, but would hopefully go to the Cabinet for approval in a month’s time.
”And we hope, later in the year we’ll be able to set it up,” she said.
The SPV would help, among other things, to proactively acquire land, hold and develop it, while the beneficiaries were undergoing skills training.
It would help to prevent beneficiaries being allocated land before they were ready to productively use it, as had sometimes happened in the past.
The proposed SPV would be an entirely new entity operating on its own, she said.
Turning to the drought situation in some parts of the country, Xingwana said her department was currently finalising a long-term drought strategy.
”We have identified the provinces that are adversely or seriously affected. We’ve also looked at a budget that we believe can assist those farmers that are drastically affected.
”We are, however, going to await the declaration of disaster areas before we can implement these interventions [that] will be informed by that declaration,” she said. — Sapa