Despite the Land Act, agricultural producers can breathe a sigh of relief as South Africa is in the “fortunate position” that demand for farm land can possibly be met without the disruptions, risks and costs of radical distributions.
This is the opinion of a new report, ‘From Land to Farming: Bringing Land Reform Down to Earth’ – published this week by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) – which argues that there is enough land already in state-ownership to meet demand for land for agricultural purposes.
“This includes state-owned land in communal and commercial areas that is lying fallow, often because previous land reform projects have failed or been abandoned,” says John Kane-Berman, author of the IRR report.
He adds that demand for land to go to farming is also more limited than official ideology assumes, that it is in fact far more outweighed by demand for land for housing in the urban areas.
“This means that demand for farm land can probably be satisfied without radical redistribution or by jeopardising the country’s agricultural output,” says Kane-Berman, adding however that it also means that SA needs to speed up its rate of economic growth in order to absorb more people in the manufacturing, mining and other service sectors of the economy.
