South African sugar industry is model for land reformApril 20, 2006

By Gershwin Wanneburg, Reuters, reported by Business Day April 19 2006;  Guyana Chronicle April 20 2006

KAAPMUIDEN, South Africa, - Eric Sibiya beams with pride as he talks about taking his first steps towards becoming a fully fledged commercial farmer.

Until last year, he was a peasant farmer with just seven hectares (17 acres) of his own in Kaapmuiden in South Africa's Mpumalanga province, 400 km (250 miles) east of Johannesburg.
Now he owns 33 hectares of some of the country's prime sugar fields. He and six other black farmers who share a 260-hectare plot are putting veterans in the industry to shame with their high-yielding crops.

"We feel strong and confident. We feel good," Sibiya said with a determined expression when asked if he was fazed by the challenge of making the leap from subsistence farming.

So he should be. He started working his 33 hectares a year ago, but already he and his colleagues are producing promising results.

The group averaged 135 tonnes per hectare, compared with 91 tonnes for the province as a whole.
This is the kind of success that the government would like to see as it tries to reverse the unequal distribution of land created by apartheid and colonial laws, by bringing more blacks into farming.

However, stories of unsuccessful land reform projects abound and the pace of transferring ownership has been painfully slow, sparking threats of land invasions from activists.

About 96 per cent of the country's commercial arable land still belongs to white farmers, according to the government, which aims to put 30 per cent of agricultural land in black hands by 2014.

Critics say the government has failed to equip new black farmers with skills to cope with a demanding industry in its haste to redress these historical imbalances and quell frustration at the sluggish progress.

In a report, the Centre for Development and Enterprise, an independent research and advocacy group, painted a gloomy picture of South Africa's future if the government continued on its current path.

It said South Africa, as an important maize supplier on the continent, risked jeopardising food security in the region by putting unskilled farmers in charge of farms.

"Our research tells us that many projects will fail; that some beneficiaries will in fact become poorer; and that a significant number of non-poor blacks will be further enriched," the report said.

Last year, South Africa produced 11.45 million tonnes of maize and by the end of February almost two million tonnes were exported to its neighbours.

"SUPPORT MADE THE DIFFERENCE"
Sugar firm Tsb Sugar says it has found the key to overhauling agriculture in South Africa without compromising productivity. It helped Sibiya and others take the big step to farming on a larger scale and supported them all the way.

Not only did Tsb Sugar give advice on everything from fertiliser to irrigation, but it also provided farmers with experts to draw up business plans and put them in touch with a bookkeeper.

Tsb Sugar handpicked Sibiya and his six colleagues out of 1,300 candidates, based on their track record as farmers, to work a property the company had bought in 2003 and spent about 15 million rand ($2.45 million) rescuing from disrepair.

With loans from ABSA bank and Tsb Sugar and a grant from the Department of Land Affairs, the seven bought the Siyathuthuka estate. "Siyathuthuka" means "we are progressing" in the Zulu language.

Officials have acknowledged the shortcomings in the government's land reform programme. They said they might call on the private sector in the future to fill the funding and skills gaps that are hampering the process.

Martin Slabbert, Head of Grower Affairs at Tsb Sugar, said this was the only way to ensure that novices were not thrown in at the deep end in such an exacting industry.

"The support made the difference. There's no doubt the failure rate would've been much higher if the support was not there," he told Reuters on the sprawling estate, a stone's throw from Kruger National Park.

"We've got to manage entrepreneurs, no matter what kind of farming it is," Slabbert added. "You cannot expect a guy to make a success if there's no support for him. You set him up for failure."

Between 1913 and 1994 over 3,5-million South Africans lost their land rights as a result of discriminatory legislation. Those rights are now being restored through a government-driven land-reform programme. The programme is three-pronged, involving restitution, redistribution and tenure security. The goal of the programme is to transfer land from white landowners to black South Africans in a way that is legal as well as being consistent with the human rights provisions of the country’s Constitution.

Tsb Sugar believes that land reform is an important step towards creating a stable business environment for South Africa’s agricultural sector.

The company sees land reform as one of its priorities and has become involved in it in many different ways.

As part of the land-reform process, Tsb Sugar plans to settle 50 medium-scale growers on 35-ha to 45-ha farms over a period of time.

Tsb Sugar GM for Corporate Communication Vusi Khoza tells Engineering News what steps Tsb Sugar has taken to involve itself in the land-reform programme.

“Tsb Sugar acquired the farm Kaapmuiden Citrus in 2003, so that it was in a position to start a medium-scale growers’ project,” says Khoza.

He says that the farm was destroyed by the previous owners’ lack of funds and was in need of total redevelopment, but that the opportunity existed for the farm to be redeveloped to suit medium-scale growers.

“The farm was bought and developed with the specific intention to establish black medium-scale growers on it as Tsb Sugar’s contribution to land reform,” says Khoza.