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Land confiscation programme unsustainable – SA parliament told

 

Famine threatens because of failing agricultural sector:

HungerMapReuters Includes South Africa 2008 JOHANNESBURG, 2 September 2009 -- South Africa's government has acquired thousands of farms to ‘redress racially skewed land ownership’, but the vast majority have failed, or are failing right now, Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti told parliament on 1 September.

Picture: the 2008 World Hunger map included South Africa for the first time in its entire 350-years of agricultural history… Also: Woman Farmer of the Year 2008 kicked off her government farm:

The government settled arbitrarily on a 30% percent farmland-confiscation goal – the amount of land they wanted to confiscate from white professional farmers who were producing all the food for the nation (24.6 million hectares) and hand it over to black subsistence farmers by 2014 – in S.Africa they are traditionally female --  and whether they know how to run commercial farms or not.  Each farmer was given a ‘certificate’, a leasehold agreement and R17,000 in cash to ‘kickstart’ their farming enterprises.

  • Professional farmers and agricultural experts warned that this plan was doomed from the start – but it became clear by June 2009 even to the ANC-regime, that on the 5.5 million hectares already parcelled out by the State, ‘many recipient black farmers were struggling to survive. “

Propaganda-lie: the land is NOT ‘owned’ by the black farmers…

The term ‘recipient black farmer’  is a propaganda-lie: none of these black farmers are given any kind of legal ownership of the land with registered Title Deeds at all --  they are merely allowed to lease it from year to year. The land-titles themselves are now owned by the State – communist-style.

In a written reply to a question in parliament, Nkwinti said on Sepember 1 2009 that a total 2,864 productive farms had been handed over by white farmers to the State – and which were now leased out to black farmers.  It showed that more than half have already failed or are failing right now. These statistics date from 2007.

  • Land confiscation programme cost US$800-million
  • Of the 1,250 failed redistributed farms, 362 were unproductive and an additional 275 were on the verge of being unsustainable "if no agricultural support (i.e. extra financing) is received". The land reform programme so far had cost about US$800 million, Nkwinti said.

Karen Kleinbooi, of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, told IRIN: "The biggest problem [with land redistribution] is there is no real vision as to what it is they [the government] want to achieve with land reform."

Six percent of entire SA land surface is farmable:

Under apartheid, 87 percent of semi-arid South Africa’s farmland – which only ever occupied SIX PERCENT of the entire South African land surface -- was owned by highly-productive white farmers who created a thriving agricultural sector -- so successful that South Africa was  a long-time food-exporting country for many decades, supplying important staple-foods to the rest of sub-saharan Africa and exporting shiploads of fresh fruit to Europe and the Far East. These farmers also housed some 1,3-million farm workers and their often very large families on their land, and provided them with free schools and a livelihood on which income taxes were paid to the central government. The black farming population (which concentrates mainly on non-commercial subsistence cropping,  ‘traditional’ livestock-herding and only grows grain for their own consumption) occupied 13 percent of this six percent of the country’s available farm land up to 1994 and moreover, paid no taxes nor produced excess food for the market most of the time.

  • South Africa is a very dry country with very little surface water, and just a few sections of the country are suitable for crop-agriculture at all.

After 1994, the ANC-regime set about reversing this successful excess-food-producing recipe – turning most of the productive commercial agricultural land into subsistence, non-productive State-farms which are leased to the black population. 

  • Yet the ANC viewed this highly unproductive and wasteful land-confiscation process as “ a political imperative” since the African National Congress-SA Communist Party-Cosatu trade union movement tricameral government gained hegemony through fraudulent elections in 1994.  During President Thabo Mbeki's tenure, from 1999 to 2008, the 30 percent benchmark for land redistribution became “a holy grail”, resulting in often bitter spats between the commercial farming sector and the government.

By the start of the year 2000, only 11,000 (white) commercial farmers remained to grow excess-crops on less than ONE PERCENT of the entire South African land surface, and still managed to provide about 50% of the population with  marketable foodstuffs due to improvements in farming methods, including the use of Monsanto’s GM-seeds:  CIA statistics: total land-surface use in South Africa 2007

That rigid, arbitrary 30 percent target

Analysts say the ANC’s rigid 30 percent target has “hobbled rather than enhanced agrarian reform”. Achieving this rigid target had ‘overshadowed all other considerations necessary to creating sustainable rural livelihoods.”

  • “The 30 percent target is not rooted in some sense of post-apartheid justice; it originated in a 1992 meeting of local and international experts convened by the World Bank on behalf of the ANC. Two members of this team focused on financial issues, including the cost implications of a future programme of redistributive land reform," Michael Aliber, a PLAAS senior researcher, noted in the organization's quarterly bulletin in June 2008.

“For good measure, they considered three scenarios: a 10 percent, a 30 percent, and a 50 percent - these were ‘good round figures’ that captured the boundaries of what was thinkable at the time," he said.

  • The 50 percent option was dismissed as "out of sight", the 10 percent was seen as "politically unacceptable", and the "30 percent option was a reasonable compromise. That's it," Aliber said.

AIDS causes agricultural collapse in southern Africa:

Another important aspect which the ANC-regime refused to include in their calculations of its land’reform’ programme was the devastating effect the AIDS-TB co-epidemics would have on the black population. The Mbeki-regime for years resisted the idea that AIDS even existed. Yet in other southern African countries, agriculture was also seen to fail according to the World Health Organisation and the FAO because young working-age adult farmers – who traditionally usually are females in most African countries – become too ill to till the land.

  • This problem is even more widespread in South Africa, which is the country with the highest infection rate in the world, with more than 6-million people infected with the HIV-AIDS virus by the year 2008, according to Medicins Sans Frontieres medical-aid agency, which operates several large AIDS-TB combination clinics in the country.

Couldn’t find enough people to farm…

Aliber recounted a discussion with an "overworked" provincial official tasked with land redistribution, who complained about how difficult it was to find beneficiaries.

  • "She was not suggesting there were no people wanting land, but rather that beneficiaries had become necessities for transferring hectares, rather than hectares being sourced to serve the needs of beneficiaries."

Kleinbooi said this very clear failure of redistributed state-farms fitted "squarely" into Mbeki's era, but there were indications of "a shift away from chasing targets ... and a shift towards more efficient land reform" by the new administration of President Jacob Zuma.

  • Policy decisions reached at the ANC congress in 2007, when Mbeki was deposed as the party's leader and replaced by Zuma, placed a "new focus on agrarian reform, including the restructuring of value chains, [that] is appropriate and much needed, given the complete neglect of these aspects in the past," Ben Cousins, director of PLAAS, said in the organisation's June 2009 quarterly review.

However – no mention has been made in any of these targets, discussions and land-handouts of the primary purpose of farming: namely to help feed the nation of 48-million, and also help feed the many millions of ‘illegal’ African migrants who have been streaming across the borders ever since 1994, including about 3-million Zimbabweans.

  • The less than one percent of the total South African land surface now left over to produce excess food-crops on by the commercial sector, isn’t nearly enough: more than half of all South African grain needs now must be imported from overseas continents.

South African population consumes 8,5-m metric tonnes of maize a year:

In 2008, South Africa's commercial farmers still managed to feed the maize-silos with 10,5-million metric tonnes of the African staple food maize (corn, mielies, samp) due to their highly-efficient farming practices and regrettably, also due to the use of genetically-modified Monsanto seed-products. The SA population last year consumed some 8,5-million metric tonnes of maize.

  • WHEAT IMPORTED FROM ABROAD BY THE BOATLOADS:
  • However, there are rapidly growing gaps in supplying other important staple foodsbesides maize : SA now has to import huge quantities of wheat each year at grossly inflated world-market prices -- and the price of bread and other staples has obviously rocketed as a result. These soaring food prices in turn spark regular, country-wide food-costs protests and growing discontent among the entire black electorate, which can be seen by the large number of incidents in which local-level ANC-councillors were targetted by violence or even murder.
  • ANC community-policing chairman executed - Cops strong-arming of protests cause violence

The bounty at Johannesburg produce market is drying up due to confiscation of Limpopo farmsPicture: Only one truck of fresh produce a week arrives from the confiscated Limpopo state-farms  at Johannesburg market now…

The Limpopo river basin's fresh-produce, fruit- and nut- farmers were also placed on notice that their land would be confiscated under the 'land-redistribution' in 2008. The results can already be seen in the fresh-produce markets of Johannesburg, where Limpopo farms by the end of 2008, were only sending  one 10-tonne truckload of fresh produce a week - down from 2007’s FIFTY equal-sized truckloads…  Also, the fertile semi-tropical KwaZulu-Natal region has also seen its all-important sugar-production collapse with 6,000 job losses, the Inkatha Freedom Party warned.

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other sources:

1994 election fraud: People's War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa,' by Dr Anthea Jeffery. Jonathan Ball publishershttp://www.jonathanball.co.za/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1869&theme=Printer

CIA statistics: total land-surface use in South Africa 2007

The Great SA Land Scandal: http://greatsalandscandal.blogspot.com/2007/06/index-foreword.html

Limpopo river basin’s fertile farms turned into wastelands: http://greatsalandscandal.blogspot.com/2007/06/chapter-1-letsitele-valley.html

http://www.fao.org/focus/e/aids/old/west-e.htm

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=85974

http://www.agrisa.co.za

http://www.tlu.co.za

Land Reform in SA, full report.pdf

FOOD_SECURITY_IN_SOUTHERN_AFRICA.pdf

http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2009/08/agriculture-fails-famine-spreads-under.html

http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2009/09/woman-farmer-of-year-2008-kicked-off.html

AIDS, effects on agriculture, SA: http://www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx?IndepthId=26&ReportId=69174

BBC revealed Zuma-Mbeki power struggle in May 2009

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