I’ve hunted in Africa and hear from several landowners in S Africa occasionally. They were saying all along that the land confiscation wasn’t happening, and it was way overblown. They were calling the whole thing ‘fake news.’
The law has been on the books for three years, and I only know of one case where paperwork reached the final stage. That property....interestingly enough...was NOT farm land but just an animal preserve of a private nature.
There are three key elements to this not happening as some have suggested. First, the banks won’t loan money to unstable farming operations, and the national farming community would fall apart in a matter of a year or two if banks say it’s too much risk.
Second, only 13-percent of the country is farmable. Less-so on the western side.
Third, lets say that you took over 20 farms in a region, broke them up into 100 small farm operations. Would all of these ‘attacks’ or farm-robberies just stop? No, the new black farmers would be attacked and become the new prime targets.
I think that the political ‘hacks’ will make the threat, and hype this a good bit. But they’ve all seen what happen in Zimbabwe. Before 1980....farmers there were generating 60-percent of the foreign earnings, which was all taxable income. What happened when the farms got broke up? Total loss of foreign income from the farms, and the taxable income disappeared.
Go look at the wine industry in S-A.....making tons of money for the tax revenue pot. It would be totally stupid to go and really mess this up.
If they wanted to do something serious....go set up a fund using the tax revenue bucket, and offer to buy the huge industrial size farms at a fair price, and then develop a program where young black farmers with education and smart help....could get small operations under some purchase scheme, and become entrepreneurs themselves.
On the other end of the spectrum....I do expect several thousand S-A white farmers to take the Russian offers, and leave for safer circumstances.