Bill slowing redistribution
2008-09-03 14:10
Cape Town - The government's target of redistributing 30% of agricultural land by 2014 will not be achieved if the current legislation is not amended, the Land Affairs Department said on Wednesday.
Uncertainties over the Expropriation Bill would slow down the government's land redistribution programme, Land Affairs Director Thozi Gwanya told journalists in Cape Town.
"It will introduce further delays (to) the protracted processes that we are going through at the moment."
The measure, which was recently shelved by the National Assembly's public works committee for Constitutional reasons, was the answer to some of the key challenges faced by the land redistribution programme.
"We need to get the enabling instruments running and we have identified that some of those need amendments, such as the Expropriation Bill," he said.
However, Gwanya said amending the law was only part of the solution as more resources were required if the redistribution process was to be fast-tracked.
"We will need an additional R74bn over the next six years in order to meet the 2014 target of 30% of agricultural land," he said.
Recent land price hikes had made the current funding system, under which the department received about R3bn per year from the Treasury for the programme, unsustainable.
"The major challenge related to land acquisition for land reform is the escalating land prices caused by inflation and changes in land use," Gwanya said.
So far the department had only managed to redistribute four million of the 24 million hectares it aimed to redistribute by 2014.
- SAPA