Banele Ginindza
Legislation to ring-fence South Africa’s productive land against an onslaught of aggressive buying by foreigners was soon going before Parliament, Rural Development and Land Affairs Minister Gugile Nkwinti said in response to concerns raised by Land Bank chairman Ben Ngubane of a “new phenomenon” that threatened food security.
Speaking on the sidelines of the presentation of the Land Bank’s financial results in Midrand yesterday, Nkwinti said his department was hoping the legislation would be accepted by business, the government and Parliament before the end of the current term. “We have come up with a policy, actually it is now a piece of legislation, that no foreign nationals will own land in this country, at least in a long-term perspective,” he said.
The legislation would put South Africa in league with countries including Brazil and Rwanda, which have recently tightened land ownership and usage laws to restrict foreign buying. The elementary concern has been the state of national food inflation and security.
Brazil, in particular, by 2008 had 4.3 million hectares of land registered as owned by foreigners and was making efforts aimed mainly at stopping the advance of China, which has been buying land in other countries through its sovereign wealth fund.
Ngubane said there was concern over the huge competition for agricultural land by Chinese and Arabic nationals who were buying aggressively to grow crops that would be exported to their own countries, which threatened local food security.
He said the bank was mulling over the idea but said it should play a more active role. “If the land is available, why should the Land Bank not buy it back,” he said, adding that it was in the national self-interest to safeguard the land because losing its use for local food production would be playing into the hands of uncontrolled food inflation.
Of South Africa’s 122 million hectares of agricultural land, just over 100 million hectares is utilised, with natural grazing using about 84 million hectares, while 17 million hectares serves as arable land and 1.2 million hectares is under irrigation
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Preliminary results of a recent land audit by the surveyor general show the government owns 14 percent or 17 million hectares out of about 125 million hectares of all land holdings.
Some European countries and the US are listed in the drive for African farmland, an opportunity recently alluded to by the continent’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, who said he saw immense potential in the agricultural space. “If you look at the projection of world population in the next couple of years, it will cross the 8 billion mark. A lot of countries need arable land and that is only available in Africa. There will be a lot happening here,” he was quoted as saying.
Opponents of the planned review of land ownership include the Free Market Foundation, analysts and opposition parties. During the development of the legislation they have offered criticism ranging from the bill harking back to apartheid laws to it being a disincentive to business investing
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