Govt to fast-track land reform
2005-07-27 16:42
Johannesburg - A national land summit opened on Wednesday with a call to South Africa's mainly white landowners to help the government fast-track its plan to redistribute nearly a third of agricultural land to blacks by 2014.
"We want to make sure the sellers work with us instead of, in some cases, seeking to exploit us," said deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka in an address at the opening of the five-day gathering in Johannesburg.
"In the second decade of democracy, we are about to fast-track land reform," she told about 1 000 delegates including land-rights activists and representatives of farmers' unions gathered at a conference centre.
Mlambo-Ngcuka took aim at the "willing buyer, willing seller" principle that has been at the centre of South Africa's land-reform policy, ensuring that white farmers are fairly compensated for land that is targeted under the programme.
Likely to alter pace of distribution
"The pace of redistribution has been negatively influenced by the 'willing buyer, willing seller' principle," she said, adding: "We would like to revisit that."
The white farmers have been criticised for setting prices for land they say is in line with market realities, but which the government complains are too high.
"We want to ensure markets cannot be the leaders in the process, because markets are not known to have mechanisms to distribute land in a manner that addresses the plight of the poor," said Mlambo-Ngcuka.
Speeding up land reform is a complex proposition for President Thabo Mbeki's government as the example of neighbouring Zimbabwe, where thousands of white-owned farms were seized in land invasions, looms large across the entire southern African region.
White farmers own 80% of arable land in South Africa and the government's objective is to ensure 30% of those farms are in the hands of black farmers by 2014, 20 years after the end of apartheid.
But, so far, only 4% of land has been acquired by the government and sold to about 700 000 blacks, according to official estimates.
Some progress has been made
Acknowledging some progress had been made on land reform in the past 10 years, Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza said: "There is a need to come up with a new path for redistribution".
She also said negotiating a market-based price for land targeted under the redistribution programme had its failings as there were "many sellers and just one buyer: the state".
More than 1.2 million South Africans had benefited from land reform through restitution or redistribution since the end of apartheid in 1994, with more than three million hectares placed in black hands, said Didiza.
She emphasised that South Africa's first democratic government "inherited one of the worst racially skewed land distributions in the world" and "undoing this legacy is therefore a fundamental priority for the nation".