If the government bought up just more than half of the farms that came on the market each year, it would easily achieve its target of redistributing 30% of agricultural land to the previously disadvantaged by 2014, says the Democratic Alliance.
”Government must become a far more active participant in the land market … and take greater advantage of the up to 4% of privately owned land that is available on the market every year,” DA land-affairs spokesperson Maans Nel told a media briefing at Parliament on Tuesday.
Currently, about 80-million hectares of agricultural land is in the hands of commercial farmers, of which about 3,2-million hectares (4%) is up for sale.
For the government to reach its 2014 target of 30% redistribution, it needed to buy 1,8-million hectares a year — about 56% of what is on offer — for the next nine years, he said.
Delays, corruption and incompetence are causing the state to lag behind in its commitment to redistribute land, Nel said, releasing a DA position paper titled Land Reform and the Willing Buyer, Willing Seller Principle.
The document says that should South Africa abandon the willing buyer, willing seller principle, ”the impact on agricultural production, the broader property market, foreign investment and the economy as a whole would be disastrous”.
Earlier this year, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said the government was set to fast-track land reform so that the 2014 target could be achieved. It did not view the willing buyer, willing seller principle as a holy cow.
”We regard the principle of willing seller and willing buyer a contributor to the slow pace, but we are not going to be reckless in the manner in which we’ll be reviewing it.
”We’ll only be doing it, not to be vindictive in any way to the farming community, but to the extent that it actually does not enable us to speedily redistribute land; definitely, it is not a holy cow,” she told MPs in the National Assembly in August.
Earlier that month, delegates at the Land Summit rejected land-reform policies based on the willing buyer, willing seller principle.
Nel said the DA is fully in favour of a sustainable, equitable and just land-reform programme.
”The DA believes that the land-reform programme can be speeded up by allowing for more market and less state — not the other way round.”
Abandoning the willing buyer, willing seller principle would undermine investor confidence and threaten the stability and productivity of the agricultural sector, he said. — Sapa