The Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, Gugile Nkwinti, says that the government will revise its 2014 target to redistribute 30% of the agricultural land in South Africa to black emerging farmers and will concentrate on creating productive and sustainable farms instead.
It also plans to create a new office of the value-general to investigate it and where the government had gone wrong in the “willing buyer, willing seller” system, which is currently being evaluated and reviewed.
He says this new office will be in “important institution” since the criteria used by valuers to determine the value of the land bought by the government was largely unknown up to now.
At least 90% of the land redistribution programme had failed.
The department says that there are 122-million hectares of land in South Africa and 100-million hectares was zoned as agricultural land of which white farmers held about 80-million hectares.
He says that for the land reform programme to be successful all farms transferred to emerging black farmers should remain 100% productive and sustainable.
Meanwhile AgriSA’s Theo de Jager says that the government had been defrauded by corrupt land valuers and its own government officials who had inflated the value of the land forcing farm prices to rise.
He cited a recent case of a Free State farmer who had agreed to sell his farm for R8-million and when he had not been paid after two years he was told that the deal had been cancelled because the price of R20-million was too high.
He says that AgriSA will not protect those farmers who are part of this corruptive process and he called on the government to “flush out those corrupt officials” who are party to such fraud and corruption.
Readers' Comments Have a comment about this article? Email us now.
Print
