The government will not be able to resolve land reform on its own and will need to enter into partnerships to address the issue, says Elton Greeve, Chief Director of Strategic Land Reform Interventions at the Rural Development and Land Reform Department. "It’s encouraging to see that the 80 partnerships that have been formed with white farmers are voluntary ... We [now] have farmers coming up to help us ... We need more non-coerced partnerships," said Greeve.
The government is under pressure to complete the land reform programme. In 2016, Parliament passed the Expropriation Bill, paving the way for the government to pay for land at a value determined by the valuer-general. The bill also allows for expropriation of land for the "public interest", ending the willing-buyer, willing-seller approach to land reform. The government said this would speed up land reform.
Greeve said many people did not grasp land reform’s economic and social effect. Vumelana Advisory Fund, a non-profit organisation that helps beneficiaries of the land reform programme put their land to productive use, recently hosted a seminar to discuss four land reform scenarios likely to unfold over the next 15 years.
Scenario 1: Connection and Capture, paints a picture of what could happen should the government allocate land arbitrarily to shore up support ahead of the 2019 elections. Such a move would benefit the politically connected.
Scenario 2: Market Power and Concentration, describes what could happen were the government tries to speed up land reform through community and private partnerships. Such a scenario would lead to the transfer of commercial farmland, but would not change the structure of agriculture.
Scenario 3: Occupation and Confiscation, describes what could happen if South Africans opt for land invasion.
Scenario 4: Hard Bargaining and Compromise, describes what could happen if South Africans agree to equitable land sharing. In such a scenario, land reform would become a shared responsibility supported by an enabling state.
Brian Whittaker, director and strategy adviser at Vumelana, said the scenarios were not predictions or proposals, but provide perspective on how things can pan out. Annelize Crosby, AgriSA’s legal and policy adviser, said scenario 4, with an emphasis on partnerships, presented an "ideal approach".
Aggrey Mahanjana, general secretary of the African Farmers Association of SA, said a combination of scenarios 4 and 2 will help the country achieve the target of creating 1-million jobs in agriculture by 2030.
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