‘SA land reform affecting sugar sector investment’
by Own Correspondent Tuesday 20 April 2010
JOHANNESBURG – Investment in South Africa’s sugar sector has gone down due to uncertainty over the country’s slow-paced land reform programme that seeks to transfer more than a third of farmland to the country’s black majority by 2014, an industry official said at the weekend.
“The finality of the land restitution programme is a necessity because the slow pace has meant that investment, and in particular capital expenditure on farms under claim, is sluggish due to the uncertainty that exists,” said
South African Sugar Association (SASA) director Trix Trikam, adding that white commercial farmers were unsure of whether to reinvest in farms under claim by black farmers.
Trikam said SASA supports the land reform initiative and the sugar industry has so far given black growers 19 percent of its commercial farms in line with the African National Congress (ANC) government policy of land
transfers.
On coming to power in 1994 the ANC promised to redistribute 30 percent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.
But the huge cost of acquiring land – estimated at R75 billion for 82 million hectares of land – as well as problems in negotiating land prices under a “willing-buyer, willing-seller” policy have seen the government
managing to acquire only 6 percent of land from private owners to date for redistribution, amid growing unrest among the poor landless blacks.
The sugar industry set up a similar programme to run concurrently with the national plan and transfer 30 percent of commercial sugarcane farms to black farmers by the 2014 – a deadline key to eliminating the unease and attract further investment.
“Should a further 10 percent of land claims be dealt with by 2014, the target of 30 percent will be met,” Trikam said.
South Africa – just like Zimbabwe – inherited an unjust land tenure system from previous white-controlled governments under which the bulk of the best arable land was reserved for whites while blacks were forced to crowd on mostly semi-arid and infertile soils.
But South Africa, which has one of Africa’s biggest farming sectors and its biggest economy, has repeatedly said it will not follow the example of Zimbabwe where President Robert Mugabe seized most of the farms owned by that country’s about 4 500 white commercial farmers and gave them over to blacks destroying commercial agriculture.
Last February a South African court dismissed a black community’s land claim because the community would not be able to meet production levels current white farmers occupying the farmland have achieved.
Farm seizures are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe – once a net exporter of the staple maize grain – into severe food shortages since 2001 after black peasant farmers resettled on former white farms failed to maintain
production because the government failed to support them with financial resources, inputs and skills training. – ZimOnline