Land issue temperature rising.

The South African government's aim to redistribute 30% of white owned farmland by 2014 is unlikely to be realised at the slow pace of the process to date. In addition, the new owners, often divorced from the land for hundreds of years, need help to be viable. The land issue, reports Tom Nevin, is coming to the boil.

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South Africa's department of land affairs has had to hurry back to the drawing board to redraft sections of its land resettlement policy after finding a significant degree of agricultural failure by resettled farmers. The minister of agriculture and land affairs, Lulu Xingwana, has noted that after some years of redistribution, the need has arisen for more help to farmers in the redistributed areas. And, says Thozi Gwanya, acting land affairs director-general, the failure rate in achieving sustainable agricultural development in rural communities benefiting from land reform could be as high as 50%.

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The need to implement a support strategy for resettled farmers is all the more urgent viewed against the government's determination to see at least 30% of mostly white-owned farmland in the hands of previously disadvantaged South Africans by 2014.

Even though just 4.7% of the targeted land has been handed over since the redistribution scheme was launched in 1994, mostly on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis, Xingwana still believes the 30% (about 25m hectares) target is achievable in the next six years with a number of other strategies introduced.

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"Expropriation, or compulsory acquisition of land where negotiations over sales have failed is likely to be stepped up, in line with existing and amended provisions in the Constitution, and greater financial resources would be made available," notes BUA, the government information service.

So far, about 3m hectares have been transferred and another 2.5m hectares will follow this year and next year. A further 3.5m hectares will be transferred each year from 2010 to 2014. Are these realistic targets in view of the fact that not even 5% of the total was transferred in more than 10 years? Xingwana thinks it can be done, especially in the light of new strategies. "We are revisiting the willing-buyer, willing-seller policy," she says. "In many cases it has not worked. Expropriations will occur, but only after the required processes have been exhausted."

Boost for farm product output

The result of the rethink is the Implementation Support strategy, a specialised agricultural assistance service for emerging farmers aimed at boosting agricultural output by 10% to 15% under the so-called ILIMA-Letsema farmer assistance campaign. The project will target 10,000 new agricultural producers on 5m hectares of formerly white-owned agricultural land. An earlier MAFISA (Micro Agricultural Financial Scheme of South Africa) farmer support fund, is already assisting some 6,000 farmers including the distribution of R56m ($8m) in support funds, including loans to buy livestock.

Determined to put productive black farmers on the land, Xingwana says ongoing support to beneficiaries of restituted and redistributed land will remain a major focus to prevent failures by "those who are returning to farming--or initiating full-scale commercial farming--after a forced separation from this activity for many decades, and even centuries".

A more radical approach that still has to be tested is to seek assistance from white farmers. The government says it will approach farmers' unions to see if, where and how they can assist emerging farmers. Some such pilot schemes in KwaZulu-Natal province are reportedly meeting with success, while a more energetic black economic empowerment (BEE) programme for the farming sector, the AgriBEE Charter, is in the process of being gazetted.

The anguish of South African land owners to land redistribution, more particularly the white ones, was understandable when viewed against the turmoil of the Zimbabwean experience. So it was with surprise that so many of the land claims were successfully dealt with in the 14 years since the process was begun. The programme has progressed more slowly than most would have liked with holdups more often over the degree of compensation rather than through stubborn white farmers clinging stubbornly to their land. Sticking points have been mainly over the price the government was willing to pay with current commercial valuation the negotiating yardstick.

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The government now says it's fed up with protracted barter and intends to shake up obstinate sellers by simply booting them off the land in a take-it-or leave settlement.

The problem here is that along with South Africa's rapid and positive economic performance in the last decade and a half, the price of land has shot up making short work of successive land repurchase budgets in the resettlement programme. Steeply rising prices are also the cause of white farmers expecting more for their land than the government thinks it is worth and resorting to the courts to fight their case.

Playing catch-up with rising land prices

It was in this climate that Minister Xingwala caused a furore amongst farmers' organisations when she said she would not mind if the value of farm land in South Africa plummeted because lower prices would make it easier for the previously disadvantaged to gain access to it.

The remark was seen as a sign of her frustration at the way rising values had slowed the transfer of land to the dispossessed.

The government is now looking at ways it can curb farm prices by, for example, imposing a land tax on owners with more than one farm thus fixing a ceiling on the amount of land an individual or single entity can own.

Black farmers' unions, in a measure of solidarity with their white counterparts, point out that the state has vast tracts of lands it could make available for farming. "There is the tendency to say it is only the white farmers that are not releasing land," observes Motsepe Matlala, president of the National African Farmers' Union.

Annelize Crosby, spokesperson for AgriSA, South Africa's biggest mostly white union, brands Xingwana's comments as "worrying" in the land issue context.

"If you devalue land, it will have a ripple effect," she warns, "and it will not only be land that will be affected." She adds that by using terms such as "plummeting prices" could have a serious negative backlash and drive white farmers off their lands with devastating effect on the agricultural sector.

Xingwana's cabinet colleague, public works minister Thoko Didiza, attempted to cool the temperature by saying Xingwana was speaking in jest and gave the assurance that the government would look at the economic effect of reduced land prices. But the furore was just getting started.

The president of the Afrikaans, all-white Transvaal Agricultural Union, Paul van der Walt, says that even if the minister's remark was meant as a joke, white farmers have realised for a long time that the government's strategy is to bring down land prices "so they can get land cheap for redistribution".

Adds Van Der Walt: "But this is gambling with the future of black and white in South Africa. If you push down prices in one sector, the disparity will eventually bring down the whole economy."

He maintains that by breaking big commercial farms into smaller plots, the government is moving in the wrong direction.

"The tendency the world over is for farmers to scale up the size of their farms to be competitive," he maintains. "South Africa is moving in the wrong direction." He points out that many of the farms transferred under the resettlement scheme have either been sold back to white farmers or are simply being used as accommodation.

Micro-agriculture co-ops

The government's aim when it launched the land redistribution programme was to create a black farming middle class, but it now seems to have changed direction and be headed towards communally-owned farming micro-enterprises. It is this aspect that worries both black and white organised agriculture. Both subscribe to the ideal that the larger the agricultural asset that can be put together, the greater the chance of its success.

Other critics of communal agriculture argue that family farms are too small to compete in a globalised commodity market, and that communal farms are prone to infighting and poor market orientation.

For Xingwana, the Implementation Support strategy is not a silver bullet for massive commercial agricultural production. "It is intended to open access to land for the poor, create new farmers and new black entrepreneurs and provide access to agricultural support services," she maintains. In the medium to long term, a land and agrarian development agency would be established. "The challenge facing us now is to promote and rebuild agricultural cooperatives that form the basic pillar of agriculture in South Africa," she says.

Is there the room and the spirit of accommodation to create sprawling small farmer communes and cooperatives alongside slick corporate agriculture? And how soon will one consume the other if those with no appetite for life on the land opt for the bright lights and sell out?