Redistributing 30% of white- owned farms

The Eastern Cape land affairs department has introduced the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) and Area-Based Planning (ABP) to speed up land redistribution to try to meet the 2014 deadline.

These two programmes, among others, would play key roles in assisting the department achieve its objectives of redistributing 30 per cent of white-owned commercial farms to the previously disadvantaged, said department head Dali Matta.

Redistributing 30% of white- owned commercial farms by 2014 is the national agriculture and land affairs‘ directive, which all provinces are expected to meet.

These programmes will not necessarily replace the government‘s land redistribution delivery vehicles, Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD), the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy (Plas) or expropriation.

They would rather complement the three delivery vehicles to speed up the process and ensure sustainable farming operations after the farms had been handed over to the beneficiaries, Matta said.

The ABP and SPV were conceived after the realisation that meeting the target would be difficult if land redistribution continued at the current pace.

“The SPV is a system whereby a land redistribution applicant accesses all the services under one roof. Currently applicants have to access all the services from different institutions.

“For example, when applying for project funding, the applicants come to us, but for support services they have to go to agriculture, and elsewhere for evaluation of land, business plan and surveying of the land. The SPV will house everything under one roof,” he said.

The SPV would shorten the length of time in which applications were processed. In turn, this would increase the pace of processing more farms, and would result in more hectares being delivered.

The concept goes to the Cabinet for final approval sometime in September. Consultation with stakeholders had taken place and they had bought in, he said,

The Eastern Cape has managed to redistribute only about 4% of the envisaged 30%, which is about 297 000ha.

With the department still having to redistribute about 2,2 million hectares in the next seven years, Matta said the SPV and ABP became more critical. The entire 30% is about 2,65 million hectares of arable land. More than three quarters of the 4% had been redistributed after 2001 after the introduction of LRAD, he said.

Before that, the government‘s delivery vehicle was the Land Acquisition Grant (Slag), which was introduced in 1995.

“Slag had to be reviewed as it was not doing well. It had limitations,” he said. Under Slag a household could only access R16 000. This did not work because in order to acquire a farm many families had to pool their grants, which created all sorts of problems as it made too many the beneficiaries of a single farm.

Unlike Slag, LRAD offers the individual the opportunity to access a minimum grant of R20 000 and a maximum of R100 000.

“With LRAD, individuals within a family can pool their grants, acquire a farm and work as a family,” he said. But LRAD is also under review. “We want to see where we can improve.”

With Plas, the government acquires arable land, develops it and leases it to beneficiaries who manage it, with the option to buy it after a certain number of years.

ABP is a new system which requires municipalities to integrate land redistribution and how best it can be achieved, in their integrated development plans. “Municipalities have been consulted about this, and they should include ABP in their annual IDP reviews,” Matta said.

Over and above the 30% of white-owned commercial farms to be acquired, Matta said, the government was busy with other projects aimed at redistributing its own land for agricultural purposes.

Speaking in Addo recently, Deputy Land and Agriculture Minister Dirk du Toit painted a sobering picture, saying about 82% of the 100 million hectares of farmland in South Africa was still in the hands of white people.

Moreover, he said since 1995 national government had managed to deliver 4% of land through redistribution. To meet the 2014 deadline, he said, about 2,86 million hectares should be distributed each year.

“This is an awesome challenge, but not insurmountable.” To this end the government would also pursue expropriation if necessary.

It would be done within the confines of the law, though, he said.

Although it could not provide figures, the Eastern Cape Commission on Restitution of Land Rights said it was close to settling all urban claims.

Project co-ordinator Mandisi Jekwa said he was confident that the commission would meet the 2008 deadline on all urban claims, except in cases beyond the commission. These were mainly claims being dealt with by the courts.

However, he said a significant number of rural claims still needed a considerable amount of attention. “Rural claims are challenging. They take much too long to process.”

Rural claims were protracted for longer than anticipated, he said, because of the lack of proper documents from claimants, the difficulty of tracing claimants, contested tribal boundaries and the fact that most rural claims, as opposed to urban claims, were communal.

“Given these challenges, it is unlikely that we will meet the deadline with rural claims.”