Land experts shape up their proposals
• Ramaphosa’s panel of advisers to submit recommendations on policy overhaul by March
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s panel of advisers on land reform will make its recommendations by the end of March on how policy should be overhauled.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s panel of advisers on land reform will make its recommendations by the end of March on how policy should be overhauled.
However, the diversity of views in the 10-member panel means that the final report may not be unanimous and will allow for minority positions.
The panel was set up by Ramaphosa last September to review all elements of land reform following public hearings on the land question, which underlined the failure of the government programmes to redistribute land.
The hearings were the precursor to a decision by parliament to amend the property clause of the constitution to enable expropriation without compensation. The panel includes academics, agricultural economists, lawyers, representatives of organised agriculture and black farmers.
Prior to parliament’s decision to amend the constitution there was a wide consensus that expropriation without compensation would make only a modest impact, if any, on the state’s ability to redistribute land. Bigger causes of land reform failure were identified as: the government and institutional weakness, the failure to support new black farmers and corruption.
Speaking at a land redistribution conference at the University of the Western Cape on Wednesday, panel member professor Ruth Hall said the panel would discuss its draft positions at a public consultation event later in February after which the final report would be presented to Ramaphosa.
A second member of the panel, economist for the Agricultural Business Chamber Wandile Sihlobo, said the group “won’t be looking to form the same view on all issues”.
Some of the issues that the panel will need to thrash out are who the beneficiaries of land reform should be; the role of small-scale agriculture; access to land for housing and settlement among marginalised people in urban and rural areas; and the role of the state versus the private sector in land reform.
At this week’s conference, unrelated to the panel and hosted by the University of the Western Cape’s Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, the “big issues” were debated in three papers.
The first by economists Nick Vink and Johan Kirsten argues for a market-led land redistribution approach in which the private sector is incentivised to provide land for redistribution.
A land management committee, which is a public private partnership at local level, plans and manages land reform and also identifies land for expropriation or acquisition.
The aim is to acquire 20% of commercial farmland per district and provide phased support for emerging farmers.
A second paper by activist Mazibuko Jara — dubbed the solidarity economy model — advocates for a state-led process in which farmworkers, labour tenants and residents of former homelands, as well as the urban poor, are prioritised for land-reform projects under forms of collective tenure such as cooperatives.
A third paper by University of Fort Hare professor Michael Aliber advocates for a middle way in which most land reform
— 75% — is allocated for settlement by the poor; 20% is allocated for small-scale farming and 5% for large farming projects. This approach combines poverty alleviation objectives with a market-driven approach and would potentially see a large number of beneficiaries — 1-million — over a 20-year period.
THE PANEL WILL DISCUSS ITS DRAFT POSITIONS AT A PUBLIC CONSULTATION EVENT LATER IN FEBRUARY
AMONG THE ISSUES THE PANEL WILL NEED TO THRASH OUT ARE WHO THE BENEFICIARIES OF LAND REFORM SHOULD BE