Western Cape calls for more speed in land redistribution
CAPE TOWN — The Western Cape provincial government says very little progress has been made in land reform as unofficial figures show that only 1.6% of agricultural land in the Western Cape has been transferred to new farmers since 1994.
In 1994, the government set a target of handing 30% of agricultural land to black recipients by this year. Last year it announced that only 8% of claimed land had been handed back, although settlements had been finalised for a far larger portion of SA’s farmland.
The provincial government, which is led by the Democratic Alliance (DA), conceded yesterday that the tardiness around land reform had created uncertainty in the agricultural sector, and called for it to be speeded up.
The National Development Plan seeks to ensure economic growth, food security and jobs via agrarian transformation and infrastructure development programmes.
The tardiness of land redistribution has at times led to sporadic land occupations around the country and to tension on farms.
Speaking at the Western Cape’s land reform summit in Stellenbosch, economic opportunities MEC Alan Winde said there needed to be faster progress in finalising the process of land reform to bring certainty to the agricultural sector.
“In the Western Cape, as in the whole of SA, our land reform risk stems from the fact that to date, too little has been done,” he said.
Accurate data was lacking regarding land reform, but according to various sources, only 1.6% of agricultural land in the Western Cape belongs to new farmers.
Mr Winde said the Western Cape’s 83 equity-share schemes had done a lot to empower workers in the sector. The provincial government has long pushed for its version of the equity-share schemes, saying such schemes are a model of genuine broad-based black economic empowerment. The schemes give farmers the option of selling their land through a share ownership scheme. This enables farm workers to buy a percentage of the farm, using money allocated by the national government for land reform. The scheme has transferred at least 4% of the province’s agricultural assets to new farmers.
Mr Winde said that since 2009 — when the DA came to power in the province — the Western Cape has invested a total of R466m in 246 agricultural land reform projects.
The DA has criticised the national government for its proposed 50% equity-share policy, saying it would lead to forced expropriation. Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti proposed earlier this year that long-term farm workers be given a 50% equity share of the farms on which they worked, to speed up land reform.
Government estimates suggest that three-quarters of restituted land is unproductive, despite state expenditure of R70bn since 1995, while more than 400,000 farm labourer jobs have been lost. Since 1994 the number of commercial farmers has dropped from 120,000 to 36,000.
The DA said Mr Nkwinti’s plan would be a recipe for agricultural disaster as it would worsen insecu- rity, destroy jobs, escalate the already catastrophic exodus of farming expertise from the industry, and have dire implications for food security in the medium term.
Deputy Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Mcebisi Skwatsha told the summit on Monday that farm workers and the youth could become a threat to the land reform programme if the government and key stakeholders such as landowners failed to bring them into the centre of land reform.