Barry Streek The Democratic Alliance (DA)hit out this week at the government’s threat to consider expropriating farmland for redistribution, charging that Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza raised the issue as a smokescreen for the local government elections.
“It is a complete lie to the say there is no farmland available,” says the DA’s Andries Botha. Moreover, “because of the state of agriculture in South Africa, more and more land is becoming available. Prices are most reasonable and in general they are coming down.” The problem, he says, is that “people are not prepared to pay”. Didiza has taken the position that market- based land reform has failed to deliver quality land at the right price and this cannot be allowed to continue. Many previously disenfranchised black people want to enter the agriculture sector, she told a Black Management Forum conference in Johannesburg, but have been constrained by the lack of available land. When Didiza took office last year, she pledged that 15-million hectares of farmland, about 30% of agricultural land, would be transferred to black South Africans within five years. But, as she told Agriculture-South Africa earlier this month, only 0,81% of farmland has been redistributed under the government’s land- reform programme. “This slow pace of delivery meant that we as a government had to go back to the drawing board to seriously address this issue,” she said.
Officially, the government has based its policy on the willing-buyer-willing-seller policy, but it is convinced that many farmers are holding out for higher-than- true-value prices for their land because they believe the government has sufficient funds to buy them out. It is for this reason that the government is looking at expropriation to buy out farms at true market values. Botha says the government has no evidence of this anywhere in the country and that many owners, particularly fruit and grain farmers, will happily sell their properties for less than market value because the prices for their products are so low at present.
-Many of the grain farmers do not even have sufficient security to borrow funds to buy seed for this year’s planting because of the low prices received last year. He agrees that more black people should become involved in commercial agriculture; about 10E000 farms a year normally change hands and if people have access to capital to buy them, they can do so. Didiza, after pointing out at the Johannesburg conference that the Expropriation Act had been in existence since 1975, asked: “Isn’t it about time we used legal instruments at our disposal to resolve some of the problems we face in land reform?” Ironically, the last time expropriation was used to buy up farms was in the 1970s, when the government bought out a number of commercial farms for incorporation into the homelands. And most of those properties are today no longer commercial farms.