Broadening landless South Africans’ access to agricultural land for commercial production and subsistence farming is a national priority for the country, President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Monday.
Ramaphosa, speaking in his weekly message to the nation, said transforming patterns of agricultural land ownership was vital not just to address the historical injustices of the past but to safeguard the nation’s food security as well.
The president said this in the context of his recent announcement that members of the public in need of land would be able to apply to lease 700,000 hectares of under-utilised or vacant state land in seven of the country’s nine provinces.
The president said he was aware that agricultural land was the mainstay of the country’s natural resource base. “The availability and sustainable use of farmland to grow crops and for animal husbandry is key to our very survival.
“South Africa has vast tracts of land suitable for agricultural production, with 37.9% of our total land area currently being used for commercial agriculture,” he said.
But, like many other countries, this country’s arable land was under threat from land degradation, water scarcity and urban encroachment. “We are also losing prime agricultural land through land-use changes.
“Given our history, broadening access to agricultural land for commercial production and subsistence farming is a national priority,” he added.
He noted that although the post-1994 land reform process had resulted in more land being restored and restituted to black South Africans, the long-effects of the 1913 Natives Land Act continued to haunt the country because the unjust law went far beyond dispossessing millions of people of their ancestral land, he said.
“By depriving our people of their right to own and work the land on which they depended for sustenance and livelihood, this great injustice effectively ‘engineered the poverty of black South Africans’ today,” he said.
“Its aim was to destroy our people’s prospects for self-reliance, independence and economic prosperity. At the most fundamental of levels, it destroyed our ability to feed ourselves.”
With land still concentrated in the hands of the minority white population, his government would continue to make deliberate efforts to release more land parcels to the majority black population to transform the country’s agriculture sector’s landownership status, the president said.
NM/as/APA