SOUTH AFRICA: Noises from the Earth summit have alarmed white farmers, writes Patrick Laurence, in Johannesburg
Amid the cacophonous oratory in Johannesburg during the Earth summit were declarations and affirmations to send shivers up the collective spine of South Africa's predominantly white commercial farmers.
Topping the list was the defiant defence by President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe of the seizure of white-owned farms for return to the "rightful indigenous black owners". They were deprived of them, he proclaimed, "in circumstances of colonial pillage".
As disconcerting for South African commercial farmers were the cheers that greeted Mr Mugabe's speech from what seemed to be a disturbing number of delegates at the plenary session. It contradicted the reassuring image of Mr Mugabe as an international pariah. Zimbabwe's Minister of Justice, Mr Patrick Chinamasa, struck a similarly alarming note during a radio interview.
"If you think that in South Africa you will be freed from what is happening in Zimbabwe, I feel sorry for you," he said.
"Because, as things are, South African blacks are in a worse situation than \ Zimbabweans."
Another disturbing development was the presence among the protesters who marched on the conference centre, under the banner of the Social Movements Indaba, of South Africa's Landless People's Movement (LPM). Formed in July last year, the LPM clamours for the return of land to dispossessed indigenous South Africans, openly admires Mr Mugabe and, judging from its rhetoric, favours the application of his land-seizure policy in South Africa.
The LPM is supported by the National Land Committee, an older movement that offers a radical critique of the land policy of South Africa's post-apartheid African National Congress government. The LPM had already flung down a gauntlet by declaring next year as the Year of the Landless People in South Africa. Its stated intention was to highlight the plight of landless South Africans.
National Land Committee spokesman Mr Andile Mngxitama explained that one of the campaign objectives was to identify land that is under-utilised, owned by absentee landlords or occupied by "abusive farmers" and to pressurise government to expropriate the land and make it available to landless citizens.
The extent of the threat to established farmers from the LPM and its allies was - and is - not easy to assess. But the National Intelligence Agency devoted a lot of time and personnel to questioning its leaders closely in the run-up to the Earth summit. The general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Mr Molefe Tsele, recognised the explosive potential of the situation. He described the skewered distribution of land in South Africa as "an issue of injustice". On his calculations, 20 per cent of the population owns 80 per cent of the land.
But President Thabo Mbeki retained an outward calm, believing that land is not the most crucial problem in South Africa. "The problem is South Africa is homelessness, not land," he said. The burgeoning of squatter settlements around South Africa's cities and towns might be adduced as evidence to support that conclusion. Empirical research - cited at a conference on the potential for opposition forces two years ago - identified the clamour for jobs as a more important priority for the poor than the demand for land.
Shifting focus from the present to the future, it is pertinent to note South Africa's land reform policy has three major components: land restitution, land redistribution and land tenure reform.
Restitution seeks to compensate black people who were deprived of their land under the forced removal policies of successive white-led governments from 1913 to 1994. Redistribution aspires to achieve a fair distribution of land between the white minority and the black majority. Tenure reform aims, primarily, at addressing the situation in the tribal "homelands" by transferring land held trust by the state to ownership of the communities and tribes living there.
The number of restitution claims submitted by the cut-off date of December 1998 is relatively small (67,300), considering that millions of people were "relocated" against their will. That suggests that the demand for agricultural land is not as acute as supposed by outsiders. About a fifth of the claims have been settled.
President Mbeki anticipates that the restitution process, based on the willing-buyer-willing-seller principle, will be completed by 2005.
The distribution programme aims to set up commercially viable black farmers on 30 per cent of agricultural land by 2020. The government plans to assist the farmers with grants of between 20,000 and 100,000 rand. Most of the targeted 30 per cent of agricultural land will be acquired from white farmers.
It is possible (but by no means certain) that government land policy will win the support of the chiefs as the major beneficiaries of the land tenure reform programme. Whether or not it will prevent landless peasants and farm workers from turning to radical and potentially disastrous solutions depends on two factors. These factors are: the calculation that the acquisition of rural farming land is not as high a priority for the black underclass as housing and employment, and, equally important, that the government will be able to deliver on the housing-employment front.