South Africa will make it easier for black people to buy predominantly white-owned farms under a controversial land-redistribution programme, Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Lulama Xingwana said on Friday.
South Africa’s government has vowed to give its black majority a 30% slice of the country’s farmland by the end of 2014 in a bid to redress the injustices of the colonial and apartheid eras, when many black people were stripped of land.
Progress has been slow, however, with only 4% of farmland now in black hands 13 years after the end of white minority rule.
In a speech to Parliament in Cape Town, Xingwana said her department would introduce a series of projects aimed at streamlining the funding of land purchases to counter criticism the process has been too bureaucratic.
She also pledged the government would do a better job of tailoring land redistribution to the needs of individual farmers.
”This issue of land will continue to raise emotions because people are inextricably linked to it, they identify their origins, identity, livelihoods and prosperity to it.
”Without land redistribution, the agrarian revolution is impossible,” Xingwana said.
Opponents of the land-redistribution programme fear South Africa’s food output will fall if it replaces white commercial farmers with less experienced black farmers. They cite examples of once-fertile land lying fallow after being transferred.
In Zimbabwe, a huge programme to redistribute white-owned farms to landless black people has coincided with a sharp drop in agricultural production.
Xingwana has said her department was learning from its mistakes and refocusing its efforts to incorporate training of black farmers who were granted land under the programme.
Progress
On Tuesday, Xingwana said that good progress is being made in establishing a ”special-purpose vehicle” (SPV) to speed up and ensure effective land reform.
Briefing the media after a meeting of the presidential commercial-agriculture working group at Tuynhuys, Xingwana said the matter was still under discussion, but would hopefully go to the Cabinet for approval in a month’s time.
”And we hope, later in the year we’ll be able to set it up,” she said.
The SPV will help, among other things, to proactively acquire land, hold and develop it, while the beneficiaries are undergoing skills training.
It will help to prevent beneficiaries being allocated land before they are ready to productively use it, as has sometimes happened in the past.
The proposed SPV will be an entirely new entity operating on its own, she said. — Reuters, Sapa