Johannesburg — THE government has admitted to a significant degree of failure in achieving the sustainable agricultural development of rural communities benefiting from land reform policies.

The failure rate could be as high as 50%, Thozi Gwanya, the acting land affairs director-general and former chief land claims commissioner, said at the launch of the land affairs department's Settlement and Implementation Support strategy yesterday.

This indicated the need for post-settlement support for land reform beneficiaries.

Beneficiaries, agribusiness and organised agriculture have long criticised the government's land-reform policies for failing to produce viable agricultural entities. Much of that is blamed on inadequate post-settlement support, and for setting up beneficiaries for failure in unsustainable agricultural projects.

The government's policy thus far has been to establish communal agricultural collectives and the development of small family farms with help from post- settlement grants.

While most critics support the need for land and agrarian reform, they say family farms are too small to compete in a globalised commodity market, and that communal farms are fraught with infighting and poor market orientation, as is evident in subsistence-level maize farming.

Over the past 12 years, more than 4-million hectares of land have been delivered to millions of beneficiaries in respect of 79000 land claims.

The strategy, launched by Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana, following a review of the department's post-settlement support programmes, and of the settlement of land acquisition grant , the land reform for agriculture development programme and the comprehensive agriculture support programme. The Belgian aid agency Belgian Technical Co-operation helped with and funded the strategy.

The "evidence-based" strategy, as the minister calls it, has not yet been adopted by the government, though Xingwana said it would form a "major" part of the department's land and agrarian reform programme.

This is intended to open access to land for the poor, create new farmers and new black entrepreneurs and provide access to agricultural support services. This would increase agricultural production by 10%-15%, and agricultural trade and export by 10%-15%, Xingwana said. In the medium to long term, a land and agrarian development agency would be established.

"The challenge facing us now is to promote and rebuild agricultural co-operatives that form the basic pillar of agriculture in SA," said Xingwana.

The minister said it was not envisaged that the co-operatives would be state owned, as they were in the apartheid era, though at this stage they would be operated by the government.

In a synopsis of the strategy published by the Land Claims Commission, the need for post-settlement support is analysed and the integration of post-settlement support with wider rural development projects is emphasised. But none of the recommendations departs from the policy status quo.

Deputy Minister Dirk du Toit emphasised that a return to the consolidation of small family farms into bigger agricultural units was not envisaged as part of the post-settlement support plan.

"Communal farming co- operation is the more sophisticated way," he said.