South African farmers called for compromise on Tuesday after the lands commissioner said that large-scale expropriation of farms would start next month.
”It is in everyone’s interest that land claims be completed as soon as possible but it needs to take place in a fair manner,” said Annelize Crosby, land affairs adviser at Agri South Africa, the biggest organisation representing white farmers.
”You cannot go around taking land left, right and centre. It would be wrong to penalise farmers because they want fair prices for their properties,” she told Agence France-Presse.
South Africa’s chief land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya said on Monday that the ”willing buyer, willing seller” model would no longer apply to land restitution because many white farmers wanted more money than the government was prepared to pay.
”There are in excess of 7 000 claims that have been outstanding,” he said, referring to efforts by the government to redress apartheid-era land grabs in which many members of the black majority lost ancestral holdings.
”We have been negotiating with some white farmers for two or three years especially in four provinces — Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West and KwaZulu-Natal — and this has to stop,” he said.
”From March, we will begin expropriating land for which negotiations have gone on for that period or more,” he said, explaining that a six-month deadline would be imposed on new cases.
But Crosby said the land claims commission needed to keep the complexity of the process in mind.
”The process started in 1994 and we are now in 2006 but there are many reasons why it is taking so long. In some cases we are dealing with really big land claims that stretch across many farms. This involves many farmers and also whole communities instead of only individuals claiming back their land. It makes the process very complicated,” said Crosby.
She acknowledged that there might be some farmers trying to take advantage of the situation.
”But one should also keep in mind that the value of land has been on the increase in the past few years. We need to find a middle ground here. It is unfair to lay all the blame at the farmers’ doors.”
The willing buyer-willing seller principle has been at the core of the post-apartheid land drive, guaranteeing that land will be acquired by the state at fair prices.
South Africa has said that it will not follow the path of Zimbabwe where thousands of white-owned farms have been seized by President Robert Mugabe’s government since 2000 and given to landless farmers.
Black ownership of land in South Africa has increased from 13% at the end of apartheid in 1994 to 16%. – Sapa-AFP