Under pressure from militant landless people, the ANC government has renewed its promise to speed-up land reform in the second decade after apartheid. One dimension of these policy adjustments, and arguably the most significant to date, is intended to ease the availability of land to peasant farmers.
For example, last year the government passed an "Expropriation Amendment" to the Land Restitution Act to stop a white landowner from obstructing the transfer of claimed land to a community removed from this land during apartheid.
This allows the Minister of Land Affairs to expropriate a piece of land under claim but a market-dictated compensation must then be paid to the landowner.
Given the limited and overstretched land reform budget, it is doubtful that the state will have enough money for this - or to settle legal costs if landowners decide to challenge a claim.
While landless communities welcomed this expropriation with compensation amendment', they do not consider it cause for celebration.
They will rejoice if the Minister uses these powers against the South African National Defense Force (SANDF) for instance.
The SANDE, one arm of the state, owns and uses vast tracts of claimed land Northern Cape and Limpopo provinces, actively obstructing dispossessed communities from getting back to their land for many years!
Shortly after the April 2004
the government started a public debate on its policy to expand the participation of blacks in South Africa's highly concentrated commercial farming sector. Roughly 50,000 white farmers own more than 80 percent of the country's most fertile farmland.
Like the black economic empowerment (BEE) charters in mining, finance and so on, this AgriBEE sets out to equalize the racial imbalances in farming.
White farmers and agribusinesses insist that this policy should not harm the contribution of commercial farming to economic development and should therefore integrate only successful black farmers into the industry.
As such, AgriBEE makes explicit a longstanding orientation in post-apartheid land reform policy, which is to create a so-called black emerging farming class. It is this layer of farmers that has benefited most trom resources and land transfers to date.
Moreover, if commercial farming is making such a major contribution towards development, why do we find the highest indicators of poverty, child malnutrition, casual jobs and slave wages on big farms?
There is clearly a need for a fundamental overhaul of the agrarian structure in South Africa; a task that the postThis marginalization of the landless majority is swelling the support-base of the Landless People's Movement apartheid government has failed to address.
Another indicator of the need to find a genuine solution to the land question in South Africa has been the birth of the Landless Peoples Movement (LPM).
Landless people, young and old, in rural and urban areas have joined the LPM over the last five years because they hardly benefited from the existing land reform process as the ANC promised in 1994.
In the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the ANC's platform in the first post-apartheid election, 30 per cent of commercial farmland was to be transferred to poor peasant HOW CAN
BUY that the LPM and APF displayed their strength and united action against neo-liberalism that underpins the state's land reform and privatization policies.
Their joint demonstration,