Two of SA’s main farming unions have sharply criticised the budget for allocating too little money to their sector and to land reform.
In his 2020 budget, finance minister Tito Mboweni set aside R495.1m for the department of agriculture, land reform & rural development to spend on biosecurity and supporting exports.
He said in his budget speech that an additional R500m would be reprioritised over the medium term for the finalisation of land claims.
Industry experts are disappointed. Agri SA deputy executive director Christo van der Rheede says the issue of biosecurity is critical because outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease and avian flu pose a "severe threat" to agriculture and SA’s food security.
"But the allocation is very little at this point, we won’t get far with the money the minister has allocated," Van der Rheede says.
While he is happy that R500m has been set aside for land claims, it’s not enough to make a meaningful impact.
"Too much money is still going towards Eskom and SAA — this is billions of rands. If you can divert those funds towards the tourism and agricultural sectors we would lift this country out of its stagnant economic growth," he says.
Last year, the National Treasury allocated R18.4bn to land reform, which it said would help finalise more than 1,700 land restitution claims and buy more than 325,000ha for landless South Africans.
Bennie van Zyl, general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union-SA, echoes Van der Rheede’s criticism.
"The R500m is nothing, it won’t go far," he says. "The government is showing us indirectly that it wants to proceed with land expropriation without compensation and that’s not good."
In his state of the nation address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the government stands ready, following the completion of the parliamentary process, to amend section 25 of the constitution "to table an expropriation bill that outlines the circumstances under which expropriation of land without compensation would be permissible".
Ramaphosa said that 44,000ha of state land had been released to date for the settlement of land restitution claims. This year the government aims to release about 700,000ha of state land for agricultural production, he said.
Ramaphosa has also said that this year the state will implement "key recommendations" of the presidential advisory panel on land reform & agriculture to accelerate land redistribution, expand farm production and transform the industry.
The advisory panel was appointed by Ramaphosa in September 2018 to guide government policy on land reform.
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