An important new land study warns the government against setting up poor black South Africans for failure in the farming sector.
The report, released this week by the Johannesburg-based Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), says the hard truth is that agriculture offers few opportunities for addressing unemployment, poverty or inequality on a significant scale, and provides an economic future for fewer and fewer people.
“We need to adopt a modern 21st-century approach to land reform in South Africa,” Ann Bernstein, CDE executive director told the Mail & Guardian. “The vast majority of interest groups involved in the land reform debate are not taking account of the realities of modern South Africa, such as urbanisation.”
Bernstein said state policies such as the black empowerment charter in agriculture and the land reform target of 30% of land in black hands by 2015 had raised unrealistic expectations. “How are we going to get to the 30% target? No one in government can you tell you that.”
The CDE report says that because of the extreme competitive pressures in agriculture, “the sector cannot be transformed into a large-scale anti-poverty relief mechanism”.
It quotes bankers in the agricultural sector as saying there is no longer room for the average commercial farmer in South Africa. White South Africans were moving out of farming because of the difficulties of making a living.
“We should avoid former homeland settlement approaches that lead to overcrowding and other poor development outcomes,” the report advises.
Bernstein said that about 60% of South Africans were urbanised and the country was heading towards a 70% figure. The report says most South Africans now see land as a “place to stay” rather than a “place to farm”.
A national survey commissioned by CDE shows that only 9% of black people who are currently not farmers have clear farming aspirations. Other surveys suggest that only about 15% of farmworkers aspire to farm on their own or full-time.
“Most blacks regard jobs and housing in urban areas as more important priorities,” the report says.
It argues that the current focus on rural land arises from an old-fashioned image of South Africa as a rural country in which prosperity is land-based, rather than urban. Land reform lobby groups should realise that black South Africans mostly want land in urban and peri-urban areas.
Bernstein emphasised that participation in state programmes was not the only way for disadvantaged people to gain access to land and use it to best effect.
“Black people also buy land through the market, and [in assessing the proportion of land owned by blacks] the government is not taking account of this,” she said. “Agricultural businesses are also doing a great deal in land reform and could do even more in future.”