South Africa cannot afford to stall land reform and the government is committed to meeting its 2015 deadline of redistributing a third of white-owned commercial agricultural land to black owners, said Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza at AgriSA’s annual congress in Bloemfontein two weeks ago.
”But,” she said, ”though haste is needed to drive land reform, it is important not to upset the balance of productivity, lawfulness and need for land.”
The minister shocked some farmers when she announced that the target of an anticipated redistribution of a third of agricultural land, in 11 years, does not include the former homelands.
Farmers told the Mail & Guardian they were under the impression that the target included all the agricultural land in South Africa. The minister’s clarification means that more white-owned land outside the borders of the former homelands will be redistributed than some farmers had thought.
Louw Steytler, president of Free State Agriculture, was sceptical about the government’s ability to meet the 2015 deadline at its current pace. ”It will be difficult for the government to have redistributed 30% of South Africa’s commercial farms without adding the weight of the former homelands,” he told the congress.
Statistics from the Department of Land Affairs show that only 8,6% of the 24,6-million hectares earmarked for land reform have been transferred so far. This means the government has to redistribute 22,1-million hectares at a rate of about two million hectares a year to meet the deadline.
During the past year the government has handed over only 295 024ha to black communities. At such a pace it will have redistributed only 21% of the targeted land by 2015.
Most delegates from the farmer’s union agreed with the minister that to ignore land reform was to invite a Zimbabwean tragedy. But they are also worried that the need to speed up land reform would damage their interests.
”We cannot turn our backs on land reform and development,” said Thinus Ferreira, a farmer from the Northern Cape. ”But land reform cannot be artificially accelerated without consulting farmers. To stray from the willing-buyer, willing-seller concept will not help agriculture in our country.”
The government has already considered new legislation to accelerate land reform. Parliament is currently debating proposed amendments to the Restitution Act, which extends the powers of the minister in settling claims.
The Bill will, for the first time, give the government the right to expropriate land for restitution in the same way as it expropriates land for road-building. The landowner will be compensated for the expropriation.
Didiza says the claims process will be accelerated because she will no longer be obliged to get a court order to expropriate a farm from an unwilling seller. But the judicial process will still be open to farmers who feel the expropriation is unlawful.
AgriSA vice-president Lourie Bosman said farmers were unhappy with the Bill because it placed the onus on them to challenge the claim in court. ”It also gives the minister too much power.”
But Didiza told a press conference that such concerns were unfounded. ”There are safeguards in our statute that will ensure that the member of the executive does not act in a manner that is not consistent with other laws of the land.”
Gawie Pienaar, a farmer in the Eastern Cape, said many farmers were willing to sell their farms, but the government did not always have the capacity to buy them. ”You can speed up land reform for all it is worth, but without finances to support the process, everything is in vain.”
He told delegates of a specific case where the farmer was willing to sell his farm to emerging black farmers at ”good market value”. But the parties heard nothing from the government and after three months the deal collapsed. The government said it could not afford the farm.