Sucre Ethique - S.Africa Sugar Industry Facing Land Reform Threat

Flex News food - mardi 16 juin 2009

Durban, South Africa, June 12 - Persistent delays in South Africa’s land reform programme pose a serious threat to investment in its sugar sector, an industry official said on Friday.

Tim Murray, chairman of the South African Canegrowers Association said the government’s failure to settle land claims by blacks on white owned commercial sugarcane farms had seen many white commercial sugarcane farmers holding back on investing.

"There is a very serious threat to investment, not necessarily from outside investors, but from the current land owners, who can’t put as much money and resources into farming as they would want to because claims on their land have not been settled," Murray told Reuters in an interview.

"There is a huge atmosphere of unease, and the reinvestment that is required it not taking place."

After the end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa’s government set a target of handing over 30 percent of commercial farmland to blacks by 2014 as part of a plan to correct racial imbalances in land distribution caused by apartheid.

The programme includes restitution, by which ancestral land was returned to black communities from whom it was taken before apartheid ended, and redistribution, allowing black farmers to secure loans to buy land from the government.

But more than a decade after the end of apartheid, poor blacks in South Africa are still waiting for farms promised to them by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which sees land redistribution as a cornerstone of black majority rule.

The sugar industry set up a similar programme to run concurrently with the national plan, under which it plans to transfer 30 percent of commercial sugarcane farms to black farmers by the 2014 deadline.

"We in the sugar industry are streets ahead in our efforts than the broader national plan. So far we have 17 percent of commercial land under sugarcane transferred to black growers and I think the 2014 target is an attainable one," Murray said.

He said another indication of the industry’s success had been the increasing amount of sugarcane being produced by small-scale black farmers.

"More than 30 percent of sugarcane is currently being produced by small subsistence farmers."

But other industry players are worried by a drop in the number of small-scale black sugarcane farmers, partly due to tighter credit markets and a lack of post-settlement support once they are allocated farms.

South African Sugar Association chairman Martin Mohale said on Thursday an industry survey had shown that more than 4,000 small-scale sugarcane producers had stopped farming.

"It’s something we’re very worried about," Mohale said.