At the African National Congress policy conference in June, the party blamed the slow pace of land reform on the various land-reform initiatives and also on the willing buyer, willing seller principle on which the land reform programme is based.

Prof Kirsten, head of the University of Pretoria's agricultural economics, extension and rural development department, said these arguments were based on limited facts and statistics.

Based on results of studies on private land transactions and the recent land reform and land restitution numbers presented by Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti in his budget speech in May, it could be argued that more than 25% of formerly white-owned agricultural land was today owned by blacks.

Prof Kirsten said government figures excluded private transactions by black farmers, which have far exceeded state-sponsored deals. Some private sales were not recorded because they did not go through the department or because the buyers did not apply for a state grant.

Since the deeds register did not classify the owner of the title deed according to race, actual land ownership by blacks was difficult to estimate unless a complex process of verification of registered title deeds was undertaken.

However, research done on land owned by blacks from private sales has suggested blacks now owned between 15% and 28% of all privately owned agricultural land, and in municipalities the figure was as high as 40%, Prof Kirsten said.

In KwaZulu-Natal, his university department estimated that privately owned land made up only 48.8% of the province. Of the 2.4-million hectares of privately owned land where ownership had already been verified and cross-checked, a total of 957,000ha, or 39.8%, were in black hands or communities.

Prof Kirsten said: "In Mpumalanga, the picture is even more dramatic, with arable agricultural land formerly owned by white farmers now in the hands of large mining companies (some with black shareholding) making up 7.8% of the total area of the province."

Prof Benjamin Cousins, senior professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, said Prof Kirsten's analysis implied that market purchases by blacks constituted land redistribution.

He said that SA's land redistribution programme was not only about racial patterns of ownership because its central goal was always about "rural poverty reduction".

Source: Business Day