SA to speed up land reform

South Africa wants to speed up its land redistribution programme to blacks and will launch a probe to find obstacles to the plan, President Thabo Mbeki said today.

"Very little progress has been made in terms of land redistribution," he said in a televised national address. "We will undertake a careful review of the inhibiting factors so that this programme is urgently speeded up," he added in his annual state of the nation speech.

He did not give further details, but the National Treasury said last October that the government would implement a "proactive land acquisition strategy" to help fast-track its land reform programme.

Land seizures
South Africa has previously hinted it may broaden land seizures to boost black land ownership, without resorting to the often-violent land seizures in neighbouring Zimbabwe. So far expropriation has been used where the government seeks to buy white-owned land from farmers who were not complying with the willing-buyer willing-seller principle. The government has vowed to put a third of all arable land in black hands by 2014, but over 90% is still owned by the white minority.

Mbeki noted that a sister programme - the land restitution programme where the government returns specific parcels of land that was taken from blacks under apartheid or colonial rule - was progressing. Land reform, in contrast, seeks to broadly increase black land ownership. The Treasury said in October that 152 445 hectares of land had so far been handed over to 8 687 recipients under the land redistribution for agricultural development programme. - Reuters