Land reform system faces collapse without radical overhaul
· Citizen
It is ironic that, as the government blasts through the contentious Expropriation Bill, it is at the same time seizing land from black farmers who were some of the first beneficiaries of land restitution programmes.
The African Farmers’ Association of South Africa (Afasa) is going to court to prevent the department of Land Reform and Rural Development from evicting the current landholders from some farms and then putting these farms on the market, or leasing them to others.
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The land was originally granted to the holders as part of some of the first land reform deals after 1994 – and, by all accounts, this particular part of that process has been a failure.
Firstly, although the beneficiaries were given 30-year leases on the land, they were never given title deeds. According to Afasa, this meant they were unable to put up their land as security for loans from finance houses.
Agriculture in this country is heavily dependent on borrowed money and many farmers, even successful large-scale commercial ones, rely on these cash injections to tide them over from planting to harvest.
Another complaint Afasa had was that the department had failed to provide real support. In one case it spoke to us about, the department had allegedly brought in “mentors” – presumably former farmers or finance experts – and these people had run the farming operations with little reference to the beneficiaries.
In one case, claimed Afasa, beneficiaries had been left with nothing, a debt of R8 million and no equipment or assets with which to continue farming. There have been a number of promising black farmers who have been thrown under the bus like this, giving fuel to racist arguments that only white people can farm. This system needs a radical overhaul – or the whole land reform edifice will crumble to dust.