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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo: Jeffrey Abrahams / Gallo Images via Getty Images)
As part of the government’s agrarian reform program, beneficiaries will receive training in financial management and business development. Experience has shown that emerging and small-scale farmers often lack the financial skills to take advantage of market opportunities and integrate into value chains.
Dear fellow South African,
Last week, the Department of Agriculture, Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (DLRD) announced that the public will be able to apply to lease 700,000 hectares of underused or vacant state land in seven of the provinces.
Agricultural land is the mainstay of our natural resource base. The availability and sustainable use of agricultural land for farming and animal husbandry is key to our own survival.
South Africa has vast tracts of land suitable for agricultural production, and 37.9% of our total area is currently used for commercial agriculture.
Like many other countries, our arable land is threatened by land degradation, water scarcity and urban encroachment. We are also losing prime agricultural land due to changes in land use.
Given our history, expanding access to agricultural land for commercial production and subsistence agriculture is a national priority.
Although the post-1994 land reform process has resulted in more land being restored and restored to black South Africans, the pernicious effects of the Native Land Act of 1913 continue to be on agricultural land ownership patterns.
The law went far beyond stripping millions of people of their ancestral land.
By depriving our people of their right to own and work the land on which they depended for their livelihood and sustenance, this gross injustice effectively ‘engineered the poverty of black South Africans’.
His goal was to destroy our people’s prospects for self-reliance, independence, and economic prosperity. At the most fundamental level, it destroyed our ability to feed ourselves.
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.
The continued monopolization of a key means of production such as land is not only an obstacle to the advancement of a more egalitarian society; it is also a recipe for social unrest.
Hunger for farmland is increasing, especially among the rural poor. And for various reasons, the pace of land reform in this particular sector has been slow and unsatisfactory.
The transformation of agricultural land ownership patterns is vital not only to address the historical injustices of the past, but also to safeguard our nation’s food security.
As noted in the 2019 report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Agrarian Reform and Agriculture, “while we export food, at home 41% of people in rural areas and 59.4% in urban areas have severely inadequate access to food “.
Agrarian reform has been a priority of successive administrations since democracy.
Between 1994 and March 2018, the state handed over 8.4 million hectares of land to previously disadvantaged people under the agrarian reform program. But this progress amounts to less than 10% of all commercial farmland.
In my State of the Nation address earlier this year, I pledged that state-owned farmland would soon be turned over for agriculture.
This is an important milestone in the land reform process and fulfills the promise of the Freedom Charter that land will be shared among those who work it.
Our redistributive vision aims to strike a balance between social justice and redress, and improve agricultural production by bringing more black farmers into the mainstream of the economy.
Land is a productive asset that generates profits and can be used as collateral to secure other assets.
We have to ensure that land acquired for agricultural purposes is used productively. To safeguard state lands allocated for agricultural purposes, the lease is not transferable. The beneficiaries will sign a lease with the state and pay a rental rate commensurate with the value of the land.
We also need to ensure that farmers are supported on the path to sustainability and profitability.
As part of this program, beneficiaries will be trained in financial management and business development. Experience has shown that emerging and small-scale farmers often lack the financial skills to take advantage of market opportunities and integrate into value chains.
We prioritize women, youth and people with disabilities as beneficiaries.
There has been demonstrable success with empowering women farmers under the existing Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy (PLAS).
In several provinces, women assigned to farms by DLRD have been able to run them successfully and even move into commercial production. In addition to the land acquisition itself, the Department continues to invest in infrastructure, equipment, and machinery to enable these entrepreneurs to conduct successful businesses.
Expanding access to land and opportunities for agriculture will support job creation and business development, and improve the market for food, agricultural products and services.
The ultimate goal of liberating these parcels of land is to transform the agricultural landscape by growing a new generation of farmers.
Leasing land on such favorable terms should stimulate them to think big; not just to grow their own businesses, but to promote shared wealth and prosperity in the communities in which they farm.
They must heal the deep divisions of our past. They must dispel the stereotype that only white farmers are commercially successful in South Africa and that black farmers are perpetually ’emerging’.
By working this land; By turning it into productive use, they will actually turn swords into plowshares. They will become the faces of national reconciliation.
Best wishes,
President Cyril Ramaphosa. DM
This is the weekly letter: From the Desk of the President, published on Monday, October 5, 2020.
