24 November 2008
editorial
Johannesburg — THE land affairs department and the land claims commission find themselves in a difficult position, caught between demands to return claimed farms to prerestitution productivity and the state's duty of caution when dealing with public finances.
After an initial round of catastrophic failures of farms handed over in restitution settlement, the department acknowledged that beneficiary communities needed help from commercial farmers, particularly in acquiring the business skills that would help farmers bring their produce to market.
That principle is now accepted wisdom. To implement it, the department conceived of strategic partners that would manage operations on the farms in a commercial partnership with the communities, usually with the strategic partner in operational control.
Now one of the department's most important partners, as measured in terms of potential revenue, has been provisionally liquidated, prompting a review of the policy and raising the possibility of yet another round of catastrophic land-reform failures.
Although the failing strategic partner, SA Farm Management, operated several high-potential fruit farms, it is too early to say whether its mess joins the long list of disasters that has come to characterise land reform in SA. The Callais estate, for instance, was another in the long list of failed Limpopo farms, but since its management was taken over by a strategic partner, production has been revived and the farm recently produced its first export crop.
SA Farm Management's failure does, however, point to a number of systemic improvements that could mitigate similar risks to the remainder of the 566 mentored projects managed by strategic partners.
First of these is that fiduciary responsibility should be extended to government structures and not begin and end with the boards of the strategic partnerships as the case is now. Directors drawn from the community rarely possess the degree of financial sophistication of their mentors with whom they serve and in many cases their participation has been perfunctory.
Second, when strategic partnerships are established, it is essential that a relationship of trust is fostered between the community and their mentors. One of the main complaints made by beneficiary communities about the strategic partnerships is they were being managed by people they did not know and, in some cases, they had reason to distrust.
The simplest way to identify suitable potential mentoring relationships is to ask the communities with whom, and under what terms, they would prefer to enter into partnerships. As commercial farmers and communities have warned various land claims commissions -- as has now been shown -- they would ignore the people's wishes at their peril.
But farming is a tough business and not all land-reform beneficiaries will take to it. There are many factors that cause farms to fail that are not necessarily related to weak government policies or poor delivery or implementation.
The establishment of the Mabedi project, a combined tourism, farming, light industrial and retail operation near Hazyview in Mpumalanga, is perhaps the textbook example of how success can be achieved in land reform. It did, however, require the co-operation of all three tiers of government, the provincial land-claims commission, the community members and a local tourism business.
Critical to the success of that operation were a number of factors: an understanding of the limitations of agriculture; an early community income; cohesion among the community members; capable community leadership; and the willingness to enter joint venture partnerships with established business.
When next land affairs is under pressure to deliver a success story, those are the factors it must consider before leaping into action.
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