LETTER: Farmers made the scapegoats

The land ownership numbers Tiisetso Motsoeneng quotes in his column are misleading (“A painful reminder of racial hierarchies still at work”, February 10). However, they do highlight the two lies that underpin SA’s manufactured land crisis.

Lie one: whites have all the land. While commercial farmers (not all white) might hold 72% of freehold land (formal farms), these farms make up only 13% of SA’s land. Most of SA’s rural land is already in black hands.

The government has failed to give these black land holders title deeds. Much of this land is in the former homelands and is the most fertile and well watered in SA. Yet it lies largely fallow — unproductive, overgrazed and eroded, used largely for inefficient residential purposes.

Why should a tiny community of successful commercial farmers on a small segment of SA land be made the scapegoats for a government that has consistently chosen to ignore and disempower rural black people already living on a far larger chunk of SA’s better land?

Lie two: an army of black agro-industrialists are waiting in the wings. If only they had land. In 87% of successful land claim cases the beneficiaries chose cash instead of land restitution. Only 13% actually wanted the land back and the bulk of those receiving land use it almost exclusive for residential purposes. Very little of this land has returned to commercial food production. (And we wonder about food inflation in SA?)

Most formal needs surveys show that South Africans want jobs and security (numbers one and two on the country’s list of needs). Land (to live on) is number 10.

Stuart Meyer
Via BusinessLIVE

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