Land ownership is the easy part
Farmers Weekly SA
1 June 2018
Since its December 2017 conference and the EFF’s motion on land expropriation being adopted in Parliament in February, the ANC has been struggling to come to grips with its own contradictory stance on implementing land reform without compensation, and how to achieve rapid and radical transfer of land without endangering food security and sacrificing the country’s agriculture sector. The party might be moving closer to providing an answer after its inaugural land summit in May this year, where, according to news reports, it was suggested that expropriation of land without compensation be limited to abandoned buildings, unutilised land, commercial property held unproductively and purely for speculative purposes, underutilised property owned by the state and land farmed by labour tenants with an absentee title-holder.
However, no matter how complex and contentious the debate on land ownership becomes, giving access to or ownership of land will always be the easy part of achieving transformation. The hard part is making sure that the transfer of land is meaningful and that it serves as the catalyst to change the economic plight of the poor and landless.
Unfortunately, nothing the ANC or EFF is suggesting with regard to land reform addresses this second, crucial part of the transformation story. No matter what is decided about land reform in South Africa, the future will not look better than the recent past if the fundamental shortcomings that have seen land reform and restitution fail over the past quarter century are not first fixed.
At a Nation in Conversation panel discussion on economies of scale during the 2018 Nampo Harvest Day near Bothaville, session anchor Theo Vorster of Galileo Capital asked the members of the panel what their first order of business would be if President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed them minister of agriculture.
The answers given by the panellists provide a good summary of those things that need to be addressed if we want to see real change and transformation in the farming sector. Grain SA CEO Jannie de Villiers said he would start by insisting on a massive drive to award title deeds to those living and farming on state-owned land, and land held in trust and under traditional authority. Prof Ferdi Meyer of the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy would guide the president to merge the departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and Rural Development and Land Reform. Not only would this help streamline those shared functions for which each department is currently partly responsible, it would also save a lot of money by cancelling out duplicate administration services. Senwes Group CEO Francois Strydom said first on his agenda would be fixing Transnet and Eskom. Head of agribusiness intelligence at Agbiz, Wandile Sihlobo, said he would waste no time fixing the inefficiencies that have plagued post-settlement support for beneficiaries of land reform and restitution in the farming sector.
Denene Erasmus
Editor