Shared Interest News

In his State of the Nation address to Parliament this month, President Thabo Mbeki, acknowledging that “little progress has been made in terms of land redistribution,” pledged to find ways to speed up the land reform program. The government aims to transfer about 30 percent of agricultural land to black people by 2014. Currently about 4 percent of land has been transferred since 1994, with about 80 percent of agricultural land still held by whites.

The racial division of land, formally imbedded by the Land Act of 1913 only three years after the formation of the Union of South Africa, long predates coinage of the word “apartheid.” And dealing with its consequences today involves not only the difficult and contentious questions of transfer of land ownership (”land reform”). It also requires addressing the even tougher issues of how to promote sustainable livelihoods for rural people (”agrarian reform”).

Shared Interest are already providing credit guarantees and technical assistance to small farmers and cooperatives for projects that are cultivating grain, sugarcane and mushrooms, and raising pigs, chickens and trout. But we understand that what is needed is not only an accumulation of small projects but also structural reform. continued…