BUSINESS NEWS
Govt seeks commercially viable farms
Posted Wed, 28 Jun 2006
Government would look at buying up commercially available agricultural land in an attempt to speed up land reform, minister of agriculture and land affairs Lulu Xingwana said on Tuesday. She was speaking after a Presidential Working Group meeting on agriculture in Pretoria. Farmers' unions, several government ministers and the private sector held discussions with President Thabo Mbeki, looking at issues such as bio-fuel development, regional trade, agri-BEE, and land reform.
Xingwana said there was consensus over the need to speed up land reform. She said one of the ways this would be done would be to buy up commercially available agricultural property. "Agri-SA will identify land that is available ... we'll be using various programmes to acquire this land as quickly as possible," she said. "There is an available land market out there, more than four percent of agricultural land are traded annually," president of Agri-SA Lourie Bosman said. He said
the union would make their data base available to government. "We'll give government first option to buy," Bosman said. Xingwana said they would also look at land being made available by the private sector and at making available some government-owned land. She said the focus would be on training new farmers to use the land in a sustainable way. "We need new farmers to farm commercially and sustainably," she said.
Sapa
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