A World Bank land expert and a prominent left-leaning South African academic have both dismissed the idea that the government is planning large-scale expropriation of private farmland.
Wild media speculation about ”mass land grabs” was sparked by National Land Commissioner Tozi Gwanya’s reported statement to the South African Press Association this week that the government would begin expropriating farms in March in cases where purchase negotiations had stretched beyond six months.
Gwanya was reacting to last week’s State of the Nation speech, in which President Thabo Mbeki said the Land Affairs Department would review the ”willing-seller, willing-buyer” principle to speed up land reform.
Land activists welcomed government’s commitment to use its expropriation powers more widely.
However, senior World Bank economist Rogier van den Brink said compulsory purchases would not take place on a large scale. ”It is better for government to negotiate a settlement with farmers, although it does want closure on restitution,” he said.
Echoing this, Ben Cousins, head of the University of the Western Cape’s Programme for Land and Agriculture Studies, said: ”Abandoning the willing-seller, willing-buyer principle will not open the gates to massive land grabs.”
Gwanya told the Mail & Guardian that the media had exaggerated the expropriation angle. The government would always prefer negotiated settlements, but it was impossible to negotiate forever while people were waiting for their land.
Van den Brink also poured cold water on land activists’ idea that expropriation offered a magic solution to the slow pace of land reform. ”Don’t oversell the idea of expropriation,” he warned. ”International experience has shown that it can be more costly because owners can contest expropriation orders in court and that obviously drives up the prices. The courts can also interpret market prices and seldom deviate from what the market originally decided.”
A World Bank working paper Consensus, Conflict and Controversy, co-authored by Van den Brink and Department of Land Affairs director general Glen Thomas, among others, also argues that expropriation is slower than other forms of acquisition.
”Expropriation transfers the title deed from the former owner to the state, which usually triggers procurement and disbursement regulations,” the paper states. ”These may delay the transfer of property rights to the beneficiaries.”
Such delays sometimes resulted in land invasions and asset stripping. To prevent this, security personnel had to be employed or the former owner rehired as a caretaker, incurring further costs.
”This has been the experience so far with the few expropriation cases [in South Africa], and … this negative experience [explains] largely why the department has not pursued expropriation on a significant scale,” the authors write.
Van den Brink told the M&G, ”expropriation is part of the government’s toolkit and should be used in the appropriate circumstances,” adding that it was to the benefit of the economy to clear restitution claims as soon as possible. ”Nothing is as bad for investment as uncertainty,” he said.
Since the government announced, at last year’s Land Summit, that the willing-seller, willing-buyer principle would be reviewed, little has happened. Even when Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza released a parliamentary report detailing her department’s future strategy on land reform, no clear indication was given of how the government planned to review the market-based system.
”The review has been a big disappointment,” Cousins said. ”The government has been very slow out of the blocks. In the seven months since the summit, there has been no inkling of what it is planning.”
To meet its own deadlines of completion of the restitution process by 2008 and transferring 30% of farmland to black owners by 2015, the government needs to put a policy in place by the end of the year, Cousins said.