South Africa's land reform programme is in dire straits and there is no chance of reaching a 2008 deadline to complete the restitution process, said a report released by a think tank on Tuesday.

The gloomy report issued by the Centre for Development and Enterprise said the country's agriculture was under serious threat from the struggling land reform strategy.

"The future of South African commercial agriculture is now on the table," said CDE executive director Ann Bernstein in a statement.

"The economic viability of many rural regions of the country is under threat, which could lead to serious negative consequences for the broader economy and society."

Ownership imbalance

At the onset of democracy in 1994, some 87 percent of agricultural land in the country was owned by whites, who make up less than 10 percent of the population.

Thirteen years later only four percent of land, or four million hectares (nearly 10 million acres), had been transferred to blacks, said the CDE.

Land reform was taking place "far too slowly" to reach the target of 30 percent — 25 million hectares — by 2014, it added.

The land restitution programme focuses on returning land to blacks that was seized by whites after 1913.

There is "absolutely no prospect" of meeting a 2008 deadline for completing all land restitution claims, the report said.

Land restitution was seriously bogged down in its last phase as the biggest rural claims — involving thousands of people — had led to "large swathes of productive land being placed under claim and therefore effectively frozen for years to come."

The sugar and timber industries were particularly under pressure.

At least 50 percent of land reform projects had been abject failures, with beneficiaries worse off after land reform due to a lack of post-settlement support from government, said the CDE.

It also warned that South Africa could go down the same path as its neighbour Zimbabwe, where white farmers were forced off their land, if land policy reform was based on racially tinged assumptions about what was holding the process back.

AFP