JOHANNESBURG
South Africa’s ANC plans to speed up the country’s land reform programme to help end poverty among the poor black majority, but the ruling party says it will not forcibly seize farms from white landowners.
After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress, which is widely expected to win general elections this month, set itself a target of handing 30 per cent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.
But progress towards the target has been slow, and only about four percent of land has been acquired from private owners amid funding problems that government officials say might hinder the government from meeting its goal.
Land reform is a sensitive issue in Africa’s biggest economy, where critics say the programme has hurt investment in the commercial farming sector and drastically reduced the land that is available for commercial agriculture.
White farmers
There are also fears that South Africa’s land programme could mirror a similar ‘fast track’ programme that damaged farming output and triggered an economic slump in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where white commercial farmers were often violently evicted by President Robert Mugabe’s government.
— Reuters
