farmers within 5 years.
Less than 5 per cent of commercial farmland has been redistributed in the first decade! In the meanwhile the timeframe to transfer 30 per cent of land is now 2015, with increasing emphasis on redistributing land to emerging black farmers who can match the state's land purchase subsidy with their own wealth.
It is this marginalization of the landless majority that is swelling the support-base of the LPM.
The LM has already established itself as a social force in the gradual revival of mass protests in South Africa.
Well before its official launch at the Conference Against Racism, held in Durban in 2001, LPM supporters engaged in land occupations.
However, the LPM is organizationally weak and therefore unable to sustain such protests in the face of farmer vigilante groups and the police force.
This is also a reason why sustainable production has not taken place on occupied land at the scale that the MST, the Brazilian landless movement, has succeeded in doing.
In a few pockets across the involving more than 20,000
gained solidarity from activists from other parts of the world who travelled to Johannesburg at that time.
The slogan, "Land, Food and Jobs", boldly inscribed on the LPM's red banners and tshirts, could be seen as a call on the unemployed in the squatter camps around the big cities to join in the struggle for land.
LM activists argue that the neo-liberal nomic policy and the property rights clause in the Constitution are the main barriers to land reform that could benetit poor peasants.
These points were repeated several times at a tribunal against landlessness and rural poverty attended by more than 300 representatives of landless peasants in December 2003.
This tribunal then challenged government to scrap the property rights clause and its 'willing seller willing buyer" land redistribution policy.
Government officials just reiterated the state's faith in private property and markets and declared that there will be no large-scale confiscation of productive farmland. • Peter Jacobs is a member of APDUSA and active in the social movements in South
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