South African Land Grabs Raise Specter of Famines

Africa's next famine may be over the horizon. Like the horrific famines of Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, the famine will be man-made. The most productive agricultural lands on the continent risk being laid waste, thanks to a new land grab by the South African government. The first targets: white owners of farms and their traditionally Christian black workers.

With neighboring Zimbabwe reeling from man-made famine brought on by "President for Life" Robert Mugabe's racially motivated land seizures, South Africa may be headed for a repeat performance, warns prominent South African farmer Philip Du Toit warns.

The new land grab is seen as a combination of continued commitment to class warfare by President Thabo Mbeki's government, and a combination of ethnic and religious persecution of conservative Christians, both black and white, whose livelihoods depend on private commercial farms. Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela in 1999, is a longtime leader of the South African Communist Party.

Du Toit, a farmer and Pretoria-based lawyer, is in Washington to raise the alarm about a new government decree that allows the state to confiscate land from white farmers at will.

Author of a new book, The Great South African Land Scandal, Du Toit warns that the land seizures, ostensibly intended to correct racial injustice, will destroy the country's commercial agriculture as it has in Zimbabwe if allowed to continue. "They say that they take it to give it 'back' to the people, but usually it remains in government hands as common property," says Du Toit, who is trying to represent victimized farmers in court. The central government also is subverting South African blacks' traditional chieftain system, he says, by usurping the decisionmaking authority of the local chiefs.

The new government policy, Du Toit tells Insight, will have a catastrophic effect on thousands of black families who work the farms. "They have no place else to go if the property is seized." The government now is seizing only white-owned farms, but Du Toit says many black farmers are concerned that if the process continues the traditional tribal lands will be next. "At the moment they will not touch the tribal areas," according to Du Toit, "they will touch only the white farms."

Chief land-claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya denounced Du Toit, who is white, calling his new book "a piece of racist literature." Gwanya alleged that the book would provoke violence. "In fact if this book gets out into the general populace I can see racial outbreaks developing between blacks and whites," Gwanya said, according to the South African Press Agency.

Du Toit tells Insight the present devastating famine in Zimbabwe is a direct result of Mugabe's confiscations of productive, white-owned farms that began in 1991.

The 1994 restitution of the Land Rights Act allowed expropriation from white farmers in South Africa, but provided legal recourse to the independent courts for those targeted for seizure. A new decree, announced early in February, eliminates any legal recourse once government officials decide to seize a farm. That is, the land is taken by fiat without appeal to the courts.

"The constitution guaranteed due process," Du Toit says. "Now the people cannot appeal."

Critics are likening South Africa's new farm-confiscation policy to the land-reform policies in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which sought to correct injustices by confiscating larger farms, breaking them up, and reorganizing the workers in collectives or state-run cooperatives. Many workers received small parcels of land as their own. However, the reforms succeeded only in destroying El Salvador's once-productive agricultural system and destroyed its export crops of rice, beans and cotton.

A quarter-century later, despite 15 years of peace and billions in international aid, tiny El Salvador is still a net importer of all three crops, and nearly one-third of its population has fled to the United States for work. This time the target is South Africa.

From the Mail and Guardian...
Land Affairs pours cold water on 'racist' new book

Pretoria

13 February 2004 11:00

A new book criticising government land reform threatens to strain relations between the government, farmers and agricultural unions, the Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs said on Thursday.

"In fact if this book gets out into the general populace I can see racial outbreaks developing between blacks and whites," said chief land claims commissioner Tozi Gwanya.

He described the book as "a piece of racist literature that would surely anger any black reader".

“Basically what it says is that blacks are useless farmers and whites should remain in possession of 87% of the land. I fear the repercussions of this book."

At the launch of the book, The Great South African Land Scandal, in Pretoria on Thursday, publisher Philip du Toit said he hoped it would "inform the broader public about the slow cancer infecting commercial agriculture in South Africa".

The book claims that recent amendments to the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act paved the way for the land affairs minister to "expropriate land at will".

Despite promises by government that this would not happen, du Toit said, land seizures in Zimbabwe started off exactly the same way in 1991.

"South Africa will harvest its lowest maize crop in 60 years, while preliminary areas planted for next season are the lowest since the 1939/40 season," he said.

Drought coupled with poor land redistribution tactics would leave South Africa and the rest of the continent in dire straits.

Department of Agriculture and Land Affairs described the book as "very dubious", saying it sought to undermine land reform gains made by the government

According to Deputy Agriculture Minister Dirk du Toit, "the sweeping statements and generalisations in the book are intolerable. Conclusions were reached without any apparent attempt to apply comparative formulae and no contrast of negatives and positives was done".

Philip du Toit would use the findings of the book in an address to a conference on Africa in the United States next week. The book accuses foreign charity organisations of pushing Africa into a continental famine by removing experienced farmers.

"We know for a fact that overseas governments are funding land claimant activists in South Africa and are enticing them to violence and hate speech," Du Toit said.

He cited British charity organisations Oxfam and War on Want as examples, claiming the latter has been blamed for creating the Landless Peoples' Movement (LPM), "whose leader recently called for South African farmers to be killed".

Du Toit claimed that these organisations have been asked to stop funding the LPM following new British anti-terrorism legislation forbidding all forms of violence and race hatred.

British High Commission spokesperson Nick Sheppard said he was not aware of such claims. If true, the matter would be probed by the Charity Commission in England and not the government.

LPM national organiser Mangaliso Kubheki acknowledged the body was funded by Oxfam and War on Want.

"I have never uttered any inflammatory statement demanding the death of farmers. What I have said is that landless people must protect themselves from farmers if government won't do it. How can farmers feed human beings to lions and then not expect repercussions," he asked angrily.

The book was based on information gathered by "qualified researchers" who visited farms handed over by the government to formerly disadvantaged people.

Not one of these farms was able to sustain itself, the book claims.

But Deputy Land Affairs Director-General Glen Thomas said the book did not provide an accurate picture.

"It appears that only the farming projects that had failed, had been selected as examples." He invited Du Toit to accompany him on a tour of the success stories.

Farming unions Agri SA and the Transvaal Agricultural Union agreed on the need of a more structured redistribution policy. But Lourie Bosman, deputy president of Agri SA, said the body did not support all the views in the book, and was not consulted on its contents. - Sapa

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.