South Africa was urged on Wednesday to tread carefully on land reform in a report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
”Land reform is a massive, complicated process and not everything can be done simultaneously,” said the 185-page report by the Paris-based club of market economies.
”The identification of realistic objectives and careful sequencing of activities are conditions for success,” it added.
Black ownership of land has increased from 13% at the end of apartheid in 1994 to 16%, but falls well short of targets set by President Thabo Mbeki’s government.
The government has set a goal of handing over nearly a third of white-owned land to new black farmers by 2014 as part of its programme to redress the injustices of apartheid.
The OECD report released in South Africa singled out land reform as one of the most pressing issues in Africa’s largest economy.
It warned that ”clarity is needed about the role and functions of institutions involved and better co-ordination between them.”
South Africa has vowed 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 black Zimbabweans.
”Land reform has a long way to go and is facing implementation challenges. There is broad consensus in South Africa that the land issue needs to be resolved as a matter of urgency, although there is much controversy about the ways it should be done,” the OECD said.
Some of the challenges to land reform include funding and training up new black farmers, it said.
”Budgets have been a constraint on the land reform programme. Provincial budget allocations have been overcommitted with the result that in some provinces, new projects cannot be approved and existing projects are jeopardised.”
It added that ”some beneficiaries of land reform suffered defaults, as they were inadequately prepared for running commerial farming in a high-risk environment or were unable to raise sufficient capital for commercial production.”
The report was part of a broader study on the situation of agriculture in four countries outside the OECD: South Africa, Brazil, China and India. – AFP
