Proposed new South African land reform laws will jeopardise the country’s future produce supply, national agricultural umbrella organisation Agri SA has warned.
In an announcement made last week, Agri SA said that the Cabinet’s Expropriation Bill – if passed by Parliament in its current form – will deter farmer investment in agriculture and thereby threaten the country’s food security.
The Bill, which is part of the government’s land redistribution policy and is still being discussed by the South African public, will empower the South African government to forcefully acquire land from white farmers at whatever price it deems reasonable even if such a price is not related to prevailing market valuations, it told SABC News.
“Food security will definitely be jeopardised as people are not going to invest in agriculture if there is a cloud hanging over their future. Expropriation law can also be used by the government to take away any assets, not just land,' Agri SA president Lourie Bosman said.
'The speed of land restitution and reform has been extremely slow. Unfortunately the government believes it is because we as farmers have not been willing participants in these programmes. However the reality on the ground is that the capacity to handle transformation in agriculture does not exist in government,' he added.
Mr Bosman told SABC News that the majority of people in the 79,000 claims registered for land restitution had opted for monetary compensation instead of land, casting aspersions over whether access to land by itself was a panacea for poverty alleviation as the government had argued. He added that the lack of post-settlement support had resulted in severe degradation of once productive land, especially in Limpopo Province where up to 70 resettled farms had totally collapsed.
Production in one of South Africa’s most productive fruit and vegetable growing regions, the Hartebeestpoort irrigation area, has dropped by about 50 per cent since 2004 when land claim notices were first published, according to South Africa’s Business Day.
Farming has stopped altogether in the region’s Geluk district, where landowners accepted the land claims commission’s offers of compensation. Elsewhere production has resumed, but on a drastically reduced scale, the paper said, and most of the farms subject to the land claim remain derelict.
The irrigation canals at the heart of the area’s success are now in a poor state of disrepair because demand for irrigation dropped, the paper reported. And fresh produce agents in the area told Business Day that the entire value chain is at risk and consumers are likely to end up paying more for, or doing without, fruit and vegetables as farms close down.
