Posted on 08/13/2006 7:52:24 PM PDT by Marius3188
The South African government has told white farmers that they risk losing their farms if they fail to agree a selling price within six months.
The Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister, Lulu Xingwana, said the deadline was necessary to speed up the transfer of farms to black people who were forcibly removed from their land under apartheid.
The transfers are part of a government programme to get 30% of farmland in black hands by 2014.
Land reform is one of the most emotive and politically charged issues in South Africa.
And returning land seized from black farmers during apartheid was of the key promises made by the African National Congress when it came to power in 1994.
Slow progress
More than 10 years on, only 4% of land has been transferred and the government is under fire for going too slowly.
The problem, ministers say, is that it is taking too long to negotiate with white farmers over the price of land.
Now, for the first time, the government has set a time limit on talks - it will negotiate for six months and no more. After that, land could be expropriated.
The challenge for the ruling ANC is to keep the promises it has made while avoiding the violence that has surrounded land reform in neighbouring Zimbabwe - where it helped bring about the collapse of the country's highly profitable agricultural sector.
Difficult task
But it is a hugely complex process.
One problem is sorting out competing claims over the same piece of land.
Families removed from farms generations ago often do not have documents. Family trees have to be constructed to see who is entitled to a share.
And if black farmers are allocated land, but not given enough capital to develop it, then agricultural production could fall.
But whatever the short-term costs, advocates of land reform say the longer-term risks of political instability are much higher if the issue is not tackled faster.
Already, grievances over land have led to violence in some areas.
Zimbabwean?
I don't know the circumstances of how property was transfered generations ago. What i do know is that somebody whose great grandfather was a subsistence farmer decades ago has in all probability lost all knowledge of how to manage land under cultivation. Especially large scale cultivation. So, a wholesale transfer from the knowledgeable to the ignorant is no different from what took place in Zimbabwe. There will be joyous festivities as cattle are slaughtered and eaten along with the seed crop. The following season, there will be famine.
Brief History lesson: Jan van Riebeeck and his 90 men landed in 1652 at the Cape of Good Hope, under instructions by the Dutch East India Company to build a fort and develop a vegetable garden for the benefit of ships on the Eastern trade route.
There is a 354 year history of white farming in South Africa.
What everyone says about upcoming mass starvation is likely correct, but what is the appropriate remedy for these wronged people?
More importantly, the aid goes first to the armed forces to keep them in business. Only if there is any left over does it get sold on the black market which helps finance the continuing dictatorships.
The United States should not have supported the ANC, but neither should they have supported apartheid, even if the country was more developed during that era.
South Africa's military is broken down proportionally by ethnicity: Afrikaaner, Zulu, English, Indian, etc.
There is a 2,000 year history of Christianity in the West.
Both are in jeopardy.
I guess the victor writes the history.
I have several close friends who emigrated from South Africa, and the path blazed by Rhodesia in its total collapse is the one SA is on.
Don't expect the black leadership to do any different or care once they are moving down that slope.
They give it about a fifteen year delta in the collapse.
What about a combination of buying the farm land and hiring the white farmers to help run things? Like how businesses buy other businesses, but still keep the bought businesses' leadership around.
All this is on it's way here. It is only a matter of time until the Azatlaners have this same story.
Good point, but I am talking about people DIRECTLY affected. Not, "Your great great granddad screwed over my great great granddad, now you owe me cracker!"
Or, at least, Africa.
Self-induced starvation thy name is Africa.
Southern Zimbabwe
?
They're south of Zimbabwe and they are following its practices.... so Southern Zimbabwe
OK
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