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PRETORIA – South Africa plans to lease state land for agriculture in a bid to correct long-standing racial imbalances, President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Monday, calling the campaign a “national priority.”
The program involving some 700,000 hectares of vacant or underutilized land will also create jobs, he said.
The parcels will be available for lease for 30 years, provided they are destined for agricultural use, beginning later this month, according to an announcement last week from the Agrarian Reform department.
The initiative is part of a larger land reform program aimed at correcting disparities caused by decades of apartheid and colonialism during which most of the land was reserved for the white minority population.
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“Given our history, expanding access to agricultural land for commercial production and subsistence farming is a national priority,” Ramaphosa said in a weekly letter to the nation.
“With land ownership still concentrated in the hands of a few, and primary agricultural production and value chains owned primarily by white commercial farmers, the effects of our past remain with us today.”
Ramaphosa noted that while the state had already sold or leased 8.4 million hectares of land to “previously disadvantaged people” between 1994 and 2018, only 10 percent was commercial farmland.
When the ANC came to power in 1994 through the victorious fight against apartheid, the government pledged to redistribute 30 percent of South Africa’s 60,000 commercial farms to blacks.
A 2017 study led by former President Kgalema Motlanthe painted the picture of a “slow and ineffective pace of land reform.”
Ramaphosa also highlighted the importance of boosting agriculture in a country where more than 40 percent of the rural population and nearly 60 percent of the city dwellers had “inadequate access to food” in 2019, numbers that are likely to have increased this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Women, youth and people with disabilities will have priority access to the leases of state farms, which are non-transferable and include compulsory training.
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“Expanding access to land and opportunities for agriculture will support job creation and business development,” Ramaphosa said.
More than two million South Africans lost their jobs between April and June this year as a result of the lockdowns imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Furthermore, unemployment is consistently higher among black South Africans, according to government statistics.
Ramaphosa hoped that farm leases, which would come with a purchase option, would “transform the agricultural landscape.”
“They must dispel the stereotype that only white farmers are commercially successful … and that black farmers are perpetually ’emerging’,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Parliament is debating constitutional amendments that would allow the expropriation of certain agricultural land without any compensation.
The deadline for their decision was delayed until the end of December 2020 due to the coronavirus.
