Farmers react cautiously to expropriation call

Namibian farmers reacted cautiously on Thursday to the government's announcement that it intends to accelerate the land reform process by expropriating property. Prime Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab, while making the announcement on state television and radio on Wednesday, assured the country that acquisition would take place in "accordance with the Namibian constitution and the relevant legislation". The Namibian parliament passed an amendment to the existing Agricultural (Commercial) Land Reform Act last year allowing expropriation against "just payment". "We, as white farmers, must not over-react," said Jan de Wet, president of the Namibia Agricultural Union. He said the union trusted that the government "will be responsible and transparent in its envisaged plan to expropriate farms". De Wet also sought to point out that the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach had proved successful - to date, 10 percent of commercial land had already been transferred to historically disadvantaged Namibians through the government's resettlement programme and private transactions. "In fact, 64.75 percent of the arable land in Namibia - both commercial and communal - [is] owned or utilised by historically disadvantaged Namibians," De Wet added. However, Gurirab said on Wednesday that "over the years, government has come to realise that the willing-seller, willing-buyer approach is cumbersome and, as a result, it would not be able to keep up with the high public demand for agricultural land". The process was "too slow because of arbitrarily inflated land prices, and the unavailability of productive land - more than 240,000 landless people are currently awaiting resettlement," he said. Only 15 farms, a total of 6,483 hectares, were acquired for resettlement in 2001/02. Figures for 2003/04 are not yet available, but by late 2003 the government had acquired only 124 farms, totaling more than 700,000 hectares, since land reform law was enacted in 1995 - well below the target of 9.5 million hectares in five years. Gurirab underlined that the introduction of expropriation "does not signal the doing away with the principle of willing-buyer, willing-seller; the two interventions will actually run concurrently". It is unclear how the government would determine "just payment" for land to be expropriated. Analyst Wolfgang Werner said the "mere announcement", without details of how and when the expropriation would take place, had "sent a wave of insecurity among the farmers and the business and investor community". See IRIN special reports on Namibian land reform: NAMIBIA: Special report on land reform, Part 1 NAMIBIA: Special report on land reform, Part 2