Efforts to accelerate change in the agricultural sector without disrupting production have run into stiff resistance from both established and emerging farmers.
The Black Economic Empowerment in Agriculture (AgriBEE) charter published by the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs in July was not well received by most stakeholders.
Farmer unions AgriSA and the Transvaal Agriculture Union (TAU) went into overdrive, describing the targets as ”insane”. TAU claimed the charter would lead to the collapse of agriculture in South Africa.
Key targets in the charter stipulate that black South Africans must own 30% of agricultural land by 2014, and hold 50% of senior management posts by 2008.
The agriculture sector must also make 20% of ”existing high-potential and unique agricultural land” available for leasing to black South Africans by 2014.
It is not only organisations representing landowners that are unhappy. Andile Mngxitama, land rights programme manager of the National Land Committee (NLC), slammed the charter.
”AgriBEE has a profit motive and does not talk about people’s needs. The current model is neither sustainable nor desirable and needs to be dismantled instead of being ‘black-washed’.”
Some of the most serious concerns involve a land reform programme that seems unable to catch up with its schedule.
By 2015 30% of South Africa’s agricultural land must be in the hands of black farmers. Land reform is certainly not on course to meet its own targets, though it remains to be seen whether this amounts to a crisis, land experts said this week.
President Thabo Mbeki announced a deadline of December 2005 for the restitution process. Substantial progress has been made with urban land claims, settled largely with cash payouts, but most of the complex and costly rural claims are still to be addressed.
This suggests that the deadline is unlikely to be met and that the planned closure of the Land Claims Commission at the end of next year is premature.
”The deadline can be met only by short-circuiting the commission’s own established procedures or by leaving the bulk of the work of implementation to whichever institution is to take over its work,” wrote Ruth Hall and Edward Lahiff from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape. ”There will certainly be much unfinished work to be done at the end of 2005.”
The government budgeted an amount of R4-billion over the current three-year Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) period to settle land claims. But the Commission has estimated that an additional R9-billion rand is needed, Hilgard Matthews, communication coordinator at the Chief (national) Land Claims Commission told the M&G.
The budget for the commission was increased from R195-million in 1999 to R933-million in the current financial year. But it is not nearly enough, Hall and Lahiff noted in a written response to queries.
”The cost of the whole land reform programme would depend substantially on two factors: policy choices — either to pursue the practice of paying full market price, or to discount past apartheid subsidies, as provided for in the Constitution — and secondly, what happens to land prices.”
Matthews says the land affairs department will honour the Constitution at all times when buying farms for land reform and that included paying market prices and negotiating with farmers.
Meanwhile the department has launched a post-settlement initiative: the Comprehensive Agriculture Support Programme.
Mbeki cracks the whip