South Africa is holding a national land summit starting yesterday aimed at finding ways of speeding up the redistribution of nearly a third of the country's agricultural land to the black majority by 2014 and redress apartheid-era land seizures.
Eleven years after the demise of white minority rule, the government of President Thabo Mbeki is facing criticism of moving too slowly while some raise the specter of Zimbabwe-style land grabs.
"What the summit should answer is how do we ensure that we redistribute 30 percent of agricultural land by 2014 ... that is what we would like to achieve," Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza said.
"After 10 years of democracy, this summit must give us an opportunity to have frank discussions and assessment of land reform," Didiza said.
"It will offer us an opportunity to see how far we have come, assess what we would have wanted to achieve and examine whether would we have done anything differently," she said.
White farmers own 80 percent of arable land in South Africa and the government's objective is to ensure that 30 percent of all farming land is in the hands of black farmers by 2014, 20 years after the end of apartheid.
But thus far only four percent of land has been acquired by the government under the "willing-buyer, willing-seller" program and given out to some 700,000 blacks, according to official estimates.
Earlier this year, Mbeki told parliament that it was almost impossible to introduce reforms without whites feeling some pain.
"The landless cannot own land until somebody else loses some of it, it's unavoidable," he said.
South Africa's land reforms policy was launched in 1996 in an attempt to reverse the infamous 1913 act that stripped black cash tenants and sharecroppers of their domain and reserved only 10 percent of the land for them.
But white fears of Zimbabwe-style land invasions were assuaged when the country's highest court in May ruled in favor of a white commercial farmer whose smallholding had been invaded by 40,000 black squatters.
In the landmark judgment, the Constitutional Court said such invasions could "be a recipe for anarchy."
However, South Africa's chief lands-claim commissioner Tozi Gwanya said in an interview earlier that he was mulling tougher measures to speed up land reform, including challenging prices that white farmers are demanding to cede their property.
He said black ownership of land had increased from 13 percent at the end of apartheid in 1994 to 16 percent, still way short of targets and added: "We are thinking of setting a ceiling on land prices depending on the region and the land and to establish our own valuers, as those used by white farmers are in cahoots with them."
Lands Minister Didiza said the summit would also examine if the private sector should be tapped to fund some of the land reforms.
RSS