Land for housing more popular than for farming
ONE OF the biggest surprises the ANC has experienced since coming to power is that demand from black people for land for farming purposes is more limited than expected. Given the fact that the Land Act prevented Africans from acquiring land in 87 percent of the country, it was widely assumed that their repeal in 1991 would result in an explosion of demand for farm land.
This did not happen. Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform Gugile Nkwinti said some years ago that 92 percent of land restitution beneficiaries had opted for financial compensation rather than land. People had become urbanised and preferred earning wages to tilling the soil. This was echoed by the secretarygeneral of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, who said that most land claim beneficiaries preferred to sell their farms. Their children were not interested in farming or studying agriculture. Both the Land Bank and the Agricultural sector education and training authority (AgriSeta) confirm that young people are not interested in farming.
One can hardly blame the youth. Even without the recent drought, farming in South Africa is exceedingly tough. Barely 13 percent of the land is arable, water is scarce and the weak rand makes fertiliser and machinery prohibitively expensive. Moreover, since liberalisation of the agricultural sector in the 1990s, South African farmers, unlike their counterparts in many other countries, mostly enjoy little protection or subsidy.
But land reform officials do not approve of those who choose financial compensation over land. Lechesa Tsenoli, a one-time deputy minister of rural development and land reform, said they should go for land, not money. The deadline for lodging land claims has been extended until 2019, but claimants are still seeking financial compensation rather than land, according to Nomfundo Ntloko-Gobodo, the chief land claims commissioner. She too says they should rather choose land. These concerns are misplaced. The fact that demand for land for farming is relatively limited means that it can be satisfied relatively cheaply, freeing funds for other essential agricultural requisites.
According to both black and white agricultural organisations, there is plenty of land in commercial areas lying fallow or underutilised, some of it abandoned by previous land reform beneficiaries. Some has been leased back to white farmers by beneficiaries who can’t or don’t want to farm, preferring simply to receive rent instead. Much of this land is now in state ownership. If individual titles were to be given to black farmers, along with working capital and agricultural extension services, the failures of so much previous land reform could be turned into successes using available land.
According to the government’s Agricultural Policy Action Plan for 2015-2019, plenty of good agricultural land with above-average rainfall in the former homelands is lying idle, producing yields far below potential. Apart from replacing communal title with individual title, bringing this land into full production requires the same interventions as in the commercial areas: notably working capital and extension services.
Individual title
Rather than trying to create a whole new class of black smallholder farmers, policy should focus on helping those who are already farming both in the commercial area and in the former homelands. Individual title would make it easier for them to obtain finance from the banking sector, but they would also need subsidised or guaranteed loans for seed, fertiliser, implements and all the other essentials. This would be cheaper than buying up large quantities of additional land for which there may be less demand than the government assumes.
It would also be less risky than settling new land reform beneficiaries in circumstances that may replicate some of the admitted failures of the past where beneficiaries were settled on land without technical backup or access to working capital. “You can give land to as many farmers as you want, but if you don’t have support programmes they will fail,” Mantashe said. Nkwinti admitted that more than half of land reform projects had failed, necessitating extensive recapitalisation. He also said chasing the 30 percent redistribution target was wasting money.
Last year Tito Mboweni, the former labour minister and former governor of the SA Reserve Bank, said the poor relationship between land restitution and agricultural performance would haunt the ANC for a long time. The relevant minister’s key performance indicator was how much land was taken away from commercial farmers, without thinking about its likely impact on food production. “I think we made a mistake in 1994,” he said, but we were “too angry about the bantustan system, without thinking strategically“.
Extension
Despite these admissions of failure, the government seems determined to press ahead with more restitution and redistribution. Even though Nkwinti himself said the 30 percent target was a waste of money, he also talked of pursuing redistribution “forever”. Hence the extension of the land claims deadline until 2019, along with legislation limiting the sizes of white farms and providing for easier expropriation.
This may fulfil some of the aspirations of the Freedom Charter to reverse the effects of the Land Act, but it will not help emerging farmers. What they need is full title, plus technical and financial support, starting with land they already occupy. This is a more modest and realistic objective than the accelerated land reform President Jacob Zuma has been promising since the beginning of the year.
Instead of complaining that land claimants prefer financial compensation to land, the ANC should rejoice that demand is lower than expected and, therefore, more manageable. Resources could then be used to support existing farmers and to buy up additional land in and around the cities. This is where the acute demand is – land for housing, rather than for farming.
About 92% of land restitution beneficiaries opted for financial compensation rather than land. People… preferred earning wages to tilling the soil.