A leading land expert this week warned that expropriation should not be seen as the sole saviour of land reform in South Africa. Edward Lahiff, a researcher at the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, says that, given the active condition of the land market in South Africa, there is no reason why the majority of land reform needs cannot be met through negotiated purchases.
“This is as long as the state is in a position to engage in effective and robust negotiations with property owners,” he said.
A recent discussion document drafted by the department of land affairs has sent shockwaves through commercial farming circles, and both international and national media have likened its proposals to a Zimbabwe-style land grab model. The department of land affairs is under pressure to speed up land reform, which, critics say, is progressing at snail’s pace.
According to the discussion document, leaked to Farmers Weekly last week, expropriation will be employed in acquisitions for land redistribution in future. At present it is used solely for settling land claims by the deadline of 2008, but the discussion document proposes the use of extensive expropriation to meet the target of redistribution of 30% of land from white to black ownership by 2014.
Lahiff says expropriation is unlikely to result in cheaper or faster land reform and should be reserved for the minority of difficult cases. But he stresses that a land reform policy that denies the power of expropriation to the state “is not really worthy of the name”.
He said there is widespread agreement that the current land redistribution policy, based on the principle of willing seller, willing buyer, is not achieving its objectives, either in terms of the rate of land transfer or the quality of land being provided. “A review of this policy is long overdue and should not come as a surprise to anyone,” he said.
The document also argues that the principle of willing buyer, willing-seller, is not adequate to address land reform in South Africa and proposes giving the state the first right of refusal. This means the state would be able to pay below-market prices for farms it wished to acquire and if farmers refused to sell to the state, they would not be allowed to sell at all.
This week government officials downplayed concerns created by the document, with land affairs Director General Glen Thomas saying the document was intended for internal discussion only as part of the process of developing the department’s policy position. While the document is dated September 27 2006, Thomas claimed “it is old”.
Apart from selected World Bank consultants, no other stakeholders were invited to the discussion about the document, angering commercial farmers who feel they have been sidelined.
“Glen Thomas and his department are just moving in their own direction. They are simply stubborn and do not want to listen to anyone,” Agriculture South Africa president Lourie Bosman told the Mail & Guardian. Bosman believes bureaucratic bungling is at the root of the slow pace of land reform. “There are farmers who have been waiting for three years for a payout from the department for their farm,” he said.
Lahiff says that while there is a clear need for the state to be more proactive and strategic in land acquisition and reliance on voluntary transactions can be an obstacle in this regard. But he agreed with Bosman that the department needs to overhaul its own highly bureaucratic processes and be more efficient in concluding deals and paying sellers timeously.
“Strict criteria should be developed under which an expropriation may take place, including criteria for compensation of landowners,” he said, adding that “market value” is just one factor to be taken into consideration when determining compensation that is “just and equitable”.