The 73% figure is usually taken from an AGRI SA land audit released last year. Whilst I do not doubt that rural land ownership is heavily skewed in favour of whites, this is a flawed report and makes a lot of questionable assumptions.
Its nowhere near accurate and the authors themselves will be the first to concede that further investigation is required.
Because I’m sure South Africans don’t tire of outsiders telling you how to run your country, here’s an idea that popped into my head:
Families/tenants/workers that have been working on white-owned land for times dating back to apartheid should get ownership shares in that land. I don’t mean any land transfer or division, but rather the big chunk of farmland owned 100% by a white family becomes ~70% or so owned by the white family, with the remaining ownership divided up by those long-term workers/tenants/etc. No land is divided, but rather they now own shares of the entire farm, and thus share in the profit (and thus they’d have to have access to the accounting books to track and check the finances periodically). Or they can choose to sell their shares.
Don’t know if this is feasible at all, and maybe someone’s suggested this before, but I thought I’d throw my ass-derived idea out there for the South Africans to shit all over.
That has been done and highlighted in a few articles - I’ll see if I can find any online that are informative and not just fluffy filler.
However, the problem is not just farm workers with insecure tenure, but also skewed land ownership patterns and persons who were evicted from their land for being the wrong race in the wrong place under apartheid, which compensation they received, if any, is best described as “grossly inadequate.”
It’s the latest figure available, and *still *puts things in a better light than the “80% owned by 40,000 families” that was doing the rounds previously. I’m happy to see other, more comprehensive figures ( as long as they’re not coming from AfriForum or the FF+)
Can’t speak for the rest of the country, but this is a model being (IME, quite successfully) pursued by several Western Cape wine farms (that page lists other social programs besides co-ownership, though). I’m familiar with the excellent product of several of those estates
There are other figures, but they aren’t much, if at all, better and many are much worse. This is why I’m advocating caution when suing or citing the report rather than outright dismissal.
Part of the reason why accurate ownership of farmland broken down by race is so hard to come by is that as efficient as the Deeds Registry is, no records of ownership by race is kept nor is race specified on a title deed. So when an organisation like Agri SA compile a report, survey or study, a race is assigned to the owner/purchaser based on the name. This is of course, flawless. :rolleyes:
I am somewhat interestingly placed in this situation: I am Zimbabwean by birth (and lived there for 24 years), and South African by descent (I live there now). I’m also “white” (as much as that has meaning in a multi-cultural society).
As my compatriots have laid out a good explanation of the situation in South Africa, I’d like to add this, for the OP:
Dear Quartz,
We have more than enough racists in South Africa as it is; we do not need you to export your hatred. Thanks anyway.
Mr. Malema has been accused and indeed found guilty of hate speech.
He has, however, not been sentenced to prison.
Judge Colin Lamont (of the Johannesburg High Court) stated that Mr. Malema may be facing criminal charges and a potential prison sentence if he persists in hate speech; but as Mr. Malema changed his tune (somewhat) since then, he has not been in court on related charges.
I personally hope that he will be imprisoned, but for the sake of accuracy, this has not yet happened.
Not really. Sometimes it fails disastrously, sometimes the results are mediocre, sometimes it works quite well. There’s a big difference between land reform that takes place within the capitalist system, land reform that takes place along cooperative lines, and land reform under socialist or communist lines. Even just taking the last one, communist countries varied quite a bit in terms of their agricultural productivity. State control of the agricultural sector had a mediocre record in the Soviet Union (after the famine era) and in Poland and Cuba, and a worse than mediocre record in China, but it worked quite well in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia:
As you point out, Latin America has done land reform many times, and although the long term effects on inequality haven’t been amazing, they haven’t resulted in massive agricultural failures either. Mexico and Peru both carried out extensive land redistribution in the 1930s and 1960s respectively, and both of them seemed to come out of it fine.
That’s what happened in Zimbabwe. It’s not a typical or inevitable sequence of events, neither in Latin America, Europe, nor Africa. Lots of countries have done land reform and only rarely does it end up with Zimbabwe. I don’t see any reason to assume the worst scenario here.
The only reason to assume that this proposal will not go well is because of the lack of specificity in how it is to be executed and assuring a continuity of competent management. If good land use and agricultural management isn’t applied, the economic damage could be dramatic, and even though agriculture isn’t a majority part of South Africa’s GDP, domestic grain and meat production provides stability even if the currently cheap imported perishable foodstuffs becomes inflated.