South Africa: Land reform moves slowly in post-apartheid era

CAPE TOWN (Allafrica) — Land reform has always been a popular part of political rhetoric for a democratic South Africa, but agrarian transformation has not been realized in the post-apartheid era. The vast majority of agricultural land is still owned by whites. Black landowners tend to have tiny plots in the former homelands.

While land rights and agricultural development would seem to dovetail, the opposite is often the case. “What shall we talk about first, land or agriculture?” asked a facilitator at a recent development conference, according to Karin Kleinbooi, researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

“There's a lot of pressure to develop a new vision for agrarian transformation,” said Kleinbooi. “Land reform isn't featuring as a priority. It's scary.”

One crucial component of land reform is the restitution of land to people who were displaced under white minority rule, which is provided for by legislation passed by the country's democratically-elected government. About 94 percent of the land claims made under the legislation have been settled, according to the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights.

Notably, however, most of those claims were settled by a cash payout rather than the transfer of land back to its original owners.

The wider redistribution of land has been slow going. While the target is for 30 percent of the country's agricultural land to be redistributed by 2014, only 5.2 percent had been transferred as of March 2009.

More to the point, much of that redistribution has not successfully alleviated food security or poverty. In fact, numerous farming projects have been poorly supported and collapsed within a couple of years.

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