EDITORIAL: Food security a vital issue

Since being appointed Rural Development and Land Reform Minister six years ago, Gugile Nkwinti, has lurched from one disastrous policy decision to the next.

Failure at both policy and implementation level has seemingly led to even more desperate and ill-informed decisions, each less likely than the last to achieve the ideals that should inform land restitution and reform.

This clutching-at-straws ad hoc policy-making is now seen as threatening the foundation of successful large agriculture.

At the inception of the land restitution programme, government gave itself just five years by which 30% of white-owned agricultural land would be redistributed to black people. This unrealistic target was later extended to 2014.

The excessively slow pace of land transfers against planned targets meant this deadline too could not be achieved. In fact the government is more than 20% shy of its 30% target.

Worse, Nkwinti admits that 90% of the farms redistributed since 1996 have fallen into disuse and are no longer productive.

The department’s solution was to pour more funds into failed farms.

With recapitalisation the new buzz word, the department promised to transfer some R2-billion into recapitalising 552 farms.

Again, none of the basics are being put in place and recapitalisation is unlikely to make these farms commercially viable or productive.

Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies founder Ben Cousins notes that until there is agreement on the wider purpose and significance of land reform, it is unlikely to succeed. There is little consensus on how land should be acquired and redistributed, who should be targeted as key beneficiaries, which land should be targeted for redistribution and how it should be kept productive. Instead, land policy has lost all coherence.

The latest attempt to cap the size of farms is perhaps the most absurd of all. The decision to introduce strict limits for how much land small, medium and large-scale farmers can own – with the rest being expropriated by government – has clearly not been thought through in a South African context.

In some regions, such as the Karoo, 5000ha would sustain a lot less cattle than 5000ha in the fertile Alexander region in the Eastern Cape. To cap the size of farms in many areas would be to destroy their sustainability with no conceivable benefit to anyone.

There is no doubt that the terrible legacies of massive land dispossession need to be addressed. But this cannot be done in the absence of consideration of land use, food production and food security for all.

Farmers on large farms reportedly produce 80% of our food. Instead of messing with what works, Nkwinti should be looking at why his department’s land redistribution policies have, to date, resulted largely in collapsed, unproductive farms.

The last thing the country can afford is to take the few productive farms left and add them to the failures.ed