Govt ponders new land policy

The South African government has been given a mandate to change the 'willing-seller, willing-buyer' approach to land reform.

Delegates attending a national land summit at the weekend rejected this approach, blaming it for the slow pace of land reform in South Africa, and urged government to scrap the policy.

The summit was attended by stakeholders in agriculture, political parties, business and various other organisations with an interest in land.

Department of land affairs director-general Glen Thomas told IRIN that the summit recommendations were not yet government policy.

"What came out of the summit were recommendations, therefore the follow-up process will be looking at those recommendations and their implementability. I think people got carried away on debates around emotive issues," Thomas commented.

He said the current land reform programme remained unchanged, and that "the white paper [policy document] was very clear on the principle of willing seller, willing buyer".

Any change in government policy relating to land reform "would mean we would have to amend the current white paper for the department of land affairs, and we would have to go through parliament to do that", Thomas explained.

"The development of a policy is a process - it's not something that happens overnight. What the summit has done is make recommendations to government that these are the things the people of South Africa would like government to attend to," he noted.

Government would immediately review the summit recommendations and identify short-, medium- and long-term goals.

"Then we go back to stakeholders and identify who's going to do what ... I suppose we may end up with working groups - it's not going to be a straightforward process, I can assure you," Thomas added.

If government accepted the rejection of the willing-seller, willing-buyer principle, it would require a "major policy shift", he admitted.

Masithula Mbongwa, director-general of the department of agriculture, agreed, saying the expropriation of land for purposes of redistribution "has never been done before", although the state had used expropriation in a land restitution case on at least one occasion.

According to the summit, more proactive and state-led interventions in land reform were required, rather than allowing redistribution to be market-led, as was currently the case.

The market had failed to provide land in specific instances, and the state was bound by the willing-seller, willing buyer principle. Mbongwa observed that "the state says, 'then in that case we cannot wait for the market and try to entice it - we will go in and procure the land for that particular target group'".

Government would thus set the price it was willing to pay, using widely recognised reference points, such as productive value of agricultural land.

Thomas pointed out that the summit's recommendations were still being reviewed, and "now the devil is in the details - that's the stage we are in".

He said although about 1.2 million people had benefited from the land reform programme, roughly 80 percent of agricultural land was still held by whites.

Of the 79,000 land claims submitted, the government had settled 62,127, with about 3.1 million hectares of land being redistributed.