JOHANNESBURG – South Africa’s government has admitted failure in its bid to transfer 30 percent of arable land to blacks by 2014, with land reform minister Gugile Nkwinti describing the ambitious target as impossible.

Speaking after meeting with mostly white commercial farmers who hold the bulk of the country’s 82 million hectares of arable land, Nkwinti said the government would revise land reform policy to focus more on achieving sustainable farm production rather than merely transferring tenure from white to black hands.

"It's impossible (for the government) to acquire 30 percent of 82-million hectares of arable land by 2014.

“I do not understand the assumptions underlying that. Let's agree that it's not possible,” said Nkwinti, whose Tuesday meeting with farmers came on the back of calls by the influential youth wing of the ruling ANC party on the government to embark on Zimbabwe-style farm seizures of white-owned farmland.

Nkwinti said the government’s preferred willing buyer/willing seller approach whereby the state pays market prices for land voluntarily offered on the market was bedeviled with problems and had failed to achieve quicker transfer of farmland to blacks.

The government was evaluating and reviewing the willing buyer/willing seller system, while a new office of the value-general will be created and will among other functions help to determine the true value of land targeted for acquisition.

The government has frequently complained in the past that a major drawback of the willing buyer/willing seller system was that it is open to abuse by farmers who often inflate prices of land once the state shows interest to acquire it.

Thousands of poor blacks are still waiting for the ANC government to deliver on its promise on coming to power in 1994 to provide land to those wishing to engage in farming. 

According to Nkwinti, the government has to date transferred only seven percent of land to blacks, while some of that land has been sold back to whites to leave only five percent of agricultural land in black hands. 

South Africa – just like its northern neighbour Zimbabwe – inherited an unjust land tenure system from previous white-controlled governments under which the bulk of the best arable land was reserved for whites while blacks were forced to crowd on mostly arid and infertile soils.

But South Africa, which has Africa’s biggest farming sector and its largest economy, has repeatedly said it will not follow the example of Zimbabwe where Mugabe has confiscated most of the farms owned by that country’s about 4 500 white commercial farmers and gave them over to blacks.

The Zimbabwean leader has refused to pay for land taken from whites saying it was stolen from its original black owners in the first place.

Mugabe’s farm seizures are blamed for plunging Zimbabwe — once a net food exporter — into severe food shortages since 2001 after black peasant farmers resettled on former white farms failed to maintain production because the government failed to support them with financial resources, inputs and skills training.

By Staff reporter and agencies