Land Reform: Why Repeat The Mistakes Of Other Countries?

At Agri Western Cape’s recent annual general meeting in Rawsonville, Dr Theo de Jager, president of the World Farmers’ Organisation, highlighted examples of land reform projects across the world, and what South Africa could learn from their successes and failures.

- Glenneis Kriel

With land reform in South Africa, it is easy for farmers to feel isolated and as if they are the first to drink from this cup. The story of land reform, however, has a long history. At the end of the Second World War, the United Nations (UN) held a major conference that had as one of its objectives the creation of a mechanism to facilitate land reform in Germany and Japan.

While land reform was designed to serve as a form of punishment to these countries, the general consensus was that the rules applied should still be valid in years to come and allow a country to achieve the widest possible impact in the shortest possible time. Broadly speaking, the agreement of 1945 stipulates that land reform should lead to economic and political stability, never be at the cost of food security, and always contribute to the alleviation of poverty.

In spite of this, talks about land reform usually evoke visions of chaos and bloodshed due to the way it unfolded in countries such as Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Brazil and the Soviet Union. The two most important issues that arise from these debates are the fairness and justifiability of land reform.

FORCE VS NEGOTIATION

In many countries, people are wondering what the implications of land reform without compensation in South Africa will mean for them. There is a perception that the way it is implemented here will have a domino effect on the rest of the world.

Land redistribution can occur in two ways:

• Forced land reform