S AFRICA DELAYS LAND REFORM
Nov 6th, 2009 by admin
South Africa has been forced to delay its deadline for farmland redistribution because of the global economic crisis. Land reform official, Thozi Gwanya, said a target to redistribute a third of the country’s farmland from white farmers to the black majority has been pushed back from 2014 to 2025. Mr Gwanya blamed the delay on a funding gap of more than 9.6 billion US dollars. More than five million hectares have already been distributed to black farmers and around 20 million hectares owned by white farmers remain to be bought by the state, Mr Gwanya said. When apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994 almost 90 per cent of farmland was owned by whites, who represented less than 10 per cent of the country’s population.
