The government is setting out to tackle the slow pace of land reform — one of the country’s most politically sensitive issues — by including it in the agriculture broad-based black economic empowerment (AgriBEE) framework.
”Patterns of land ownership remain, for the most part, unchanged from the apartheid era and the pace of land redistribution has been slow,” said last year’s South African Human Rights Commission report on human rights violations in farming communities. Increasing frustration has given rise to repeated warnings and threats — real or spurious — of land invasions.
Many land rights activists and analysts believe land reform is still at an impasse.
”The time is right for this kind of high-level political negotiation after years of slow land reform,” says Ruth Hall, researcher at the University of the Western Cape’s Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas). ”There is a need to determine how land owners and businesses come to the party, not on an ad hoc individual basis but systematically, as a sector.”
Hall cautions that the devil will be in the detail of the AgriBEE, in how it is implemented. ”Not all farms have annual reports to set out equity targets,” she said.
Only too aware of having to balance black expectations — of land and entry into agriculture — with white fears within tight land and agriculture budget, the government has introduced a leasehold option under AgriBEE.
It stipulates that by 2014 established industry players, for the most part white farmers, make 20% of ”high potential and unique agricultural land” available to black South Africans. This is over and above the long-standing government target of redistributing 30% of agricultural land.
In addition, 10% of agricultural land held by current farm owners should be available to farm workers for their own crops and animals to assist in poverty alleviation and food security.
Leasehold access is seen as a creative option to overcome the high cost of land, which has bedevilled restitution and redistribution, which are based on the principle of willing buyer, willing seller.
”Leasehold arrangements are an entry-point for farmers,” Depart- ment of Agriculture Director General Bongiwe Njobe told the Mail & Guardian, adding that such arrangements are already happening in the commercial sector. ”It’s there. We deliberately want to make it available to black people.”
And it seems the government has done its homework. It mapped the country and found much highly productive land is underutilised.
While predominantly white farming organisations maintain that ”you can’t just put a farmer on the land”, black farmers are very clear in their expectations — they want farms.
Asked about the leasehold provisions in the charter framework, National African Farmers’ Union (Nafu) president Motsepe Mathlala picked his words carefully: ”I want to suggest maybe it’s an attempt by government to balance and to ensure those who do not have land do not rebel. Our position is very simple: we want land.
”This must occur in a win-win situation with others in the sector … A solution benefiting both black and white farmers must be found.”
But this week organised agriculture expressed disappointment with the AgriBEE framework, particularly its land reform aspects.
AgriSA president Japie Grobler told the M&G the land reform proposals were ”not acceptable”. Enough land comes on the market to achieve the government’s target of 30% of redistribution of agricultural land by 2014, he said.
”There is no plan in this document for what is going to be done with the land [earmarked for redistribution],” he adds, pointing out there was no indication of how emerging farmers will receive crucial support.
Tough talks will certainly take place until November, when the empowerment charter is to be finalised.
The Landless People’s Movement (LPM) and National Land Committee (NLC), a network of rural-based organisations and land activists, have cautiously welcomed the charter process, if not its provisions.
”We will be happy … if it gives land to our people. But the time-frames are too long. People are being abused right now,” said Mangaliso Kubheka, LPM national organiser.
The NLC, meanwhile, renewed its call for a land summit. It was ”morally and politically unacceptable” not to fundamentally reverse the willing buyer, willing seller principle of land reform, said the NLC’s national land rights coordinator, Andile Mngxitama.