Don't Ignore These Aspects Of The Land Panel Report

Dr. Tinashe Kapuya, Value Chains lead at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy, takes a closer look at the report produced by the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture to highlight some of the suggestions that have received little public attention.

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The past month has seen a flurry of opinion pieces on the report published by the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture. While the document has generally been well received, with critics saying it moves the land reform debate forward, the reviews have raised some issues. These include:

•  The expropriation without compensation  (EWC) approach on whether to amend Section 25 of the Constitution to enable EWC, or revert to applying existing legislation, which some argue is sufficient to expropriate without compensation.

•  Land tax, to be levied as a punitive measure on those holding unproductive or underutilised farmland. The tax is based on an incentive system that promotes optimal land use by increasingly taxing land that is underutilised.

•  Land ceilings, which regulate landholding by limiting the size of parcels of land that can be held by any individual or corporation. In its previous form, this policy was deemed not implementable due to its one-size-fits-all approach to intensive and extensive production systems across different agro-ecological zones.

UNDER THE RADAR

In addition to the topics above, a number of issues that form substantial sections of the report have been largely ignored in public discourse and require further thought and debate. These include:

•  Off-tenure rights, particularly with respect to how these can be alienating, and how customary law is not fully recognised within common law. It is important to acknowledge that pure private ownership and pure traditional structures of ownership have both failed to address the land hunger issue.