Wednesday, 29 June 2005
Input to NAFU National Agricultural Summit 14 March 2004
1. INTRODUCTION
Mr President, Motsepe Matlala and executive of NAFU, Honoured Guests and Delegates. As the SACP we would like to express our appreciation for having been invited to address this event. We regard NAFU as a very important role player in the struggle for accelerated land and agrarian reform in our country.
The theme of my brief address to you today is on the need for joint action in accelerating land and agrarian transformation, by seeking to bring together as wide a range of forces as possible, particularly workers, the poor and small-scale farmers.
Let me start by briefly telling you about our Red October Campaign to accelerate land and agrarian transformation. The aim of this campaign is mobilise the mass of our people to drive land and agrarian reform for their benefit. This is informed by the fact that during the first decade of our freedom, land and agricultural reform has been very slow. It is estimated that less than 3% of productive agricultural land has been transferred to the black majority in our country. At the rate at which we are moving it is estimated that it will take a century to transfer even the 30% of agricultural land, as embodied in the Draft BEE Charter. It is therefore our considered view that unless we mobilise people to drive this programme, very little will change.
It is for this reason that we launched our Campaign, by holding marches and pickets throughout the country, under the slogan “Mawubuye Umhlaba”. The Campaign had a huge impact on, and resonance with our people. We estimate that about 20-25 000 people participated in marches and pickets on the National Day of Action on 6 November 2004. This National Day of Action was preceded by a range of intense engagements with the landless and rural masses, through people’s forums and farm workers’ tribunals. In total there were more than 70 such forums/tribunals throughout the country which reached about 10,000 people.
The 3 main demands we submitted through these marches were:
• Accelerated transfer of land, agrarian reform and access to land for the workers and landless rural poor
• Access to basic services and rights by the workers and the poor in farms and rural areas
• A National Land Summit, convened by NEDLAC, within the next 12 months
A central theme in the Red October Campaign was the need to challenge agricultural capital. Ten years into a democratic South Africa, we have seen massive resistance to land reform and protection of apartheid land ownership patterns and slave-labour conditions under which close to a million farm workers still toil. We have argued that therefore agricultural capital must answer the question: what is their contribution to democracy? What is their contribution to addressing the historical land grievance? How can they justify the reality that more than 80% of productive land is still in the hands of some 46,000 white corporations and individual farmers? How can they justify the reality that less than 3% of this land has been redistributed to the landless over the last ten years? What have they done about this, and what are they going to do to correct this huge historic, social, political and economic injustice? What is their contribution to the land restitution process?
The primary challenge facing our Party and all progressive forces struggling for land and agrarian transformation is the unity in strategy and action of a wide range of progressive and mass forces to take forward this struggle: a people’s coalition for land, bread and work, so to speak. The SACP has now brought together more than 50 organisations, including those working in the land and rural sector, trade unions, women’s organisations, religious organisations, and other potential allies, organisations and stakeholders. All have agreed to work and struggle together for the realisation of the objectives of accelerating land and agrarian reform.
When we met on 15 October 2004, as this wide range of organisations, we emerged with a consensus towards a common minimum platform which included the following:
• Support for the central demand for a National Land Summit
• A national land audit
• Access to farms, rural communities and any other place where people live and work to organise, assist and mobilise them
• The protection of all rights under the constitution (freedom of association and expression) to organise and mobilise on the land issue
• An end to evictions
• Support each other’s respective campaign actions, including the Red October programme which will culminate into a National Day of Action on 6 November
? To debate further the alternatives to the willing buyer, willing seller principle, the need to shift the restitution date, a common and appropriate strategy towards unused land, the need to decommodify land and food to ensure food security, other government policies including the budget and the various forms of organisation that are needed to organise people living and working in farms and rural areas
The most important message we are bringing to you today, is that we wish to formally invite NAFU to join together with these organisations to increase our muscle and pressure towards accelerated land and agrarian reform.
2. THE NATIONAL LAND SUMMIT
It is critical that the National Land Summit must be secured and held this year. This Summit should bring together government, farm workers and labour organisations, landless people, landowners & agricultural capital in order to:
• review land and agrarian reform since 1994
• agree on specific measures, policies, targets and programmes to accelerate land and agrarian reform
• map out a strategy and programme to transform the agricultural sector in favour of broad-based, and not narrow black economic empowerment
• review policy on foreign land ownership
• develop a common approach to content and targets in the Agri-BEE Charter
These organisations have also agreed that such a national land Summit must be preceded by a People’s Land Conference. Such a conference must not only harmonise our demands and programme in preparation for the National Land Summit but it must also be used for two other tasks: the mobilisation of our people around the land audit and their land demands, and to co-ordinate our struggles beyond the Summit. We must really all go out to mobilise our people through mass meetings and tribunals, identification of unused land, as well as engaging with government as part of compiling people’s demands. Effective consultation is needed with all structures. We also hope NAFU will join us on this, as an important voice for small farmers.
The SACP will also be directing its efforts towards local mobilisation and organisation. To this end we will work towards the establishment of people’s land committees (PLCs), throughout the country. These PLCs must bring together farmworkers, the landless communities, co-operatives and small scale farmers to put pressure for accelerated land and agrarian reform in their localities, both in white owned farms and the former bantustans. Considerable efforts are required to conscientise and unite landless people, to formulate specific demands at a local level, to pursue these issues within formal government structures, trade unions, women’s organisations, municipalities, traditional authorities, etc. and to stimulate a culture of self-mobilisation and self-organisation. We see NAFU and its members as an important component of this effort.
3. THE ROLE OF THE STATE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LANDLESS
The Communist Party is keenly interested in deepening unity between, on the one hand, a progressive and democratic state and parliament, with, on the other hand, the organised mass power of the landless. This unity is critical in shaping an appropriate relationship of engagement and struggle with the agricultural capital who are beneficiaries of colonial and apartheid land dispossession. Indeed the state has an interest in the success of the agricultural sector. In other words, the role of the democratic government is critical in addressing the historical land grievance. The democratic government has a constitutional mandate and legislative, budgetary and implementation power which must all be now used advance a thorough-going and pro-poor land reform process. One of the practical things is that of a state-led industrial strategy for the agriculture sector .
But we need to debate the spaces available for such a strategy to succeed. How government responds to the demands is going to be critical and thus the need for the Party to continue engaging closely with the Minister and the relevant departments and parastatal institutions. Other organisations and forces have a role to play too.
4. DEBATING THE WILLING SELLER, WILLING BUYER PRINCIPLE & THE PROPERTY CLAUSE
In the course of the campaign we have been seeking answers to several important questions, including:
• whether our government is budgeting enough on land reform and restitution to meet the 30% target;
• whether the current market-based “willing-seller, willing-buyer” approach is not itself the major stumbling block when it comes to adequate budgeting; and
• whether this market-based approach will secure the strategic objective of effective transformation of agriculture, ensuring food security and sustainable livelihoods for millions of rural poor.
A related but important matter in this regard is that of expropriation as a tool to fasttrack land and agrarian reform. For whatever reason, there is a frequent assumption in South Africa that the property clause in the Bill of Rights is an impediment to major land reform. It is our considered view that the constitution provides an adequate framework for expropriation. We need to work together to ensure that government uses this method as prescribed in our constitution.
So let’s remind ourselves what the property clause (Clause 25) in our Bill of Rights actually says.
The first sub-clause (25.1), affirms that “no one may be deprived of property except in terms of law of general application, and no law may permit arbitrary deprivation of property.” This is quite correct, and the SACP fully supports this principled and law-based approach to property.
The second sub-clause then allows for the expropriation of property, but it sets clear conditions for such expropriation. It must be:
• “for a public purpose or in the public interest”; and
• there must be compensation “the amount of which…[has] either been agreed to by those affected” (i.e. in practice, a market-based agreement) “OR decided or approved by a court.”
Sub-clause 3 then elaborates on the criteria required to establish what is appropriate compensation. It calls for “an equitable balance between public interest and the interests of those affected, having regard to all relevant circumstances”. Five “relevant circumstances” are then listed as guiding principles and only ONE of them refers to the “market value of the property”.
The other principles are the “current use of the property”, “the history of the acquisition and use of the property”; “the extent of direct state investment and subsidy in the acquisition and beneficial capital improvement of the property”; and “the purpose of the expropriation.”
It is to these other four principles that we should increasingly pay attention, particularly given the fact that the history of South Africa, is essentially a history of land dispossession. In our view not enough attention has been paid to these principles, thus the tendency to elevate the “willing buyer willing seller principle” as the primary method through which to drive land reform in our country.
As the SACP we also condemn the inflation of land prices by landowners, as recently exposed by the Minister. This leads to a situation where the landowners become the major beneficiaries of land reform aimed at addressing then needs of the landless poor. We believe these practices are widespread. They can only be fully exposed if we are mobilised on the ground, and government strengthens its capacity to monitor this properly.
We wish to conclude our input, by expressing a wish for the SACP to have a full bilateral with the executive of NAFU to discuss these and other matters further.