Once again the proposal that the departments of Agriculture and Land Affairs be put under one ministry came under attack during the TAU SA’s annual congress.
Talking about the principle of private landownership, Klaas Pretorius of SA said the Department of should focus on economic aspects while the Department of strived to achieve government’s ideological goals. “With which hat does the minister go to work every day? Which hat does she prefer?” asked, saying the right thing would be to separate the two departments.
Pretorius said it’s important to compare the western principle of private landownership, where individuals can apply their entrepreneurship towards food production, with a system of communal ownership. He continued that the western principle had proved its ability to put food on the table, while communal landownership had, despite good soil and climatic conditions in Africa, not been able to produce enough food for the people of Africa.
Pretorius said despite continuing efforts to emphasise the above, it seemed government did not recognise the need for an economically viable agricultural sector. “Input suppliers should start calculating their potential turnover for a scenario where dynamic commercial agriculture is done away with and replaced by subsistence farming,” he said.
In a thinly veiled warning stressed that those who vested their hope in the “new” farmers should take note of the trend that government was transferring land, but seemed to be holding back title deeds, so even if these farmers wanted to produce commercially, they could not apply for production credit as they had no land to offer as security. “Is this not a process of nationalising the land of South Africa?” retorius also warned that the current political policy would render Africa dependent on food imports to feed its people. “But even if we could import, we would still not be able to get the food to our tables as our infrastructure is in no shape to shift such volumes,” he said. – Jasper Raats
