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May 27 2012 11:21
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May 27 2012 13:09
The oversupply of golf estates has claimed another victim.
Centurion - South Africa's
largest farmers' union urged the government on Wednesday to
revise its new policy of taking back unproductive farms.
Theo de Jager, deputy president of farmers body AgriSA, said
the government's "use it or lose it" policy was likely to worsen
tensions between unions, the government and land reform
beneficiaries.
"The whole process should be redesigned. We fear that this
(use it or lose it policy) might lead to even more conflict ...
on land reform farms," De Jager told a media briefing.
Tensions have surfaced over the selection of beneficiaries
for the land redistribution programme, with unions accusing the
government of giving land that should be used for commercial
farming to inexperienced and inadequately supported people,
threatening South Africa's food security.
Land reform is a sensitive issue, highlighted by the decline in agriculture in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe's government violently
evicted white commercial farmers from their land.
Total redesign
"We call for a total redesign of the composition of
beneficiaries," De Jager said. "For one, land should not be
transferred to whole communities, it doesn't work."
He said farm workers and ex-farm workers should be given
priority in the selection of beneficiaries for land
redistribution.
"Many of them have spent a lifetime on farms and
very often they have all the practical know-how," he said.
The government took over an ostrich farm from
a co-operative earlier this month after Agriculture and Land
Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana announced the "use it or lose it"
policy for farms which the black beneficiaries have left idle.
Xingwana said the policy would be applied to farms falling
under the redistribution programme, which enables blacks to
secure loans to buy or lease land from the government.
It would
not apply to restitution, by which black communities recover
ancestral land taken from them under apartheid.