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Johannesburg - Government should investigate new land ownership models such as ownership with the view of letting and ownership limiting the number of owners of a farm, rather than trying to "water down" the value of farmland or tamper with the willing-buyer/willing-seller principle, AgriSA President Johannes Möller said Monday.
Reacting to a reported statement by Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti, to the effect that government was "obsessed" with reaching its target of redistributing 30% of farm land to black farmers to avoid a "calamity", Möller cautioned against the "haste" with which government was approaching land reform.
Government has conceded that 49% of land reform projects have failed to establish successful farming ventures on the redistributed land.
Möller said in an interview that government has not yet moved away from share schemes whereby farm workers become shareholders in a white-owned commercial farm - a method that proved to frustrate beneficiaries due to the fact that the large number of workers co-owning the farm reduces the value of the share once profits are shared among them.
"It is imperative that government upholds principle of willing-buyer/ willing-seller so as to retain investor confidence in South African agriculture and not end up like Zimbabwe with our farm sector in shatters."
"Land bought for beneficiaries does not necessarily have to be farmed by the new owners themselves - it can be let to a farm manager for the purposes of optimum production.
"Another yet untested scenario is limiting the number of owners of a farm and not allowing a string of farm workers co-ownership. This way profits that are divided among a few owners only will go much further without frustrating the shareholders."
It materialised recently that the Land Claims Commission was short of R10bn to pay for land it had already bought from farmers and to pay land beneficiaries.
Möller said given land values since the 1990s, it is questionable why government has only managed to transfer 5% of farmland to black owners as the amount spent over that period was enough to have paid for 31% of land for farming purposes.
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Fin24.com