Peacemakers broker South African land reform

Some are concerned about the costs of maintaining big farms, while others complain about the environmental devastation that can come from mining and agriculture.

“If you do this right, mining can bring the funding that restores what was before,” Booyens tells them. Ultimately, the community must have a vision for what it wants to do with the land and a plan to make it sustainable, he tells them. “The only persons who can mobilize the community is yourselves,” he says.

The community leaders – reticent during the meeting – say a prayer and leave laughing and slapping hands.

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The government’s ambitious redistribution target – 30 percent of white-owned farmland redistributed to blacks by 2014 – “hugely underestimated what it would take to achieve their targets,” says Michael Aliber, a land reform expert at the University of the Western Cape.

The goals are so underfunded that they will fall a decade behind schedule, says South Africa’s director general for land affairs, Thozi Gwanya. (Today, only 4 percent of farmland has been redistributed or sold to blacks since the end of apartheid; whites still control 86 percent.)

There is also debate about how redistributed land will be owned and how it will affect the success of the development of black communities.

The government preference for community ownership could doom redistribution from the start, suggests Rogier Vandenbrink, a World Bank land reform expert in Johannesburg. “What is community ownership? It means collective ownership. And where has that worked in the world?” he asks. “Even in China, they’ve gone back to small-scale individually owned farms.”

Further, many white farmers worry that the complexities of running a massive commercial farm may be beyond the technical skills of black community members, few of whom have done farming on any scale, and many of whom have spent most of their lives working in big cities.

By taking Chief Alfred and his community in as partners and teaching them the citrus business – all before actually selling off his land – Nicholson is preparing for the inevitable, and ensuring that the farm he built doesn’t go to waste.

Nicholson says he and other willing sellers in the area started working with the Venda community four years ago. He admits that he had doubted whether the new black owners would be able to run a large farm, deal with demanding international customers, and make educated predictions about rainfall and use of irrigation. If they would be the new owners, Nicholson thought, he should teach them the operation.

“You can fight about whose it is, or you can try to utilize it,” he says. Starting in 2004, Nicholson began to take senior members of the Venda community as shareholders. He began to hire younger Venda people as laborers and managers and involved them in business decisions. Nicholson’s efforts attracted the attention of Booyens, a former agribusiness executive who consults with white farmers and black communities to hammer out deals that will work. At Booyens’s urging, local communities near Nicholson’s farm are thinking about the larger business and cultural opportunities that may come once the land returns to Venda hands.

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Taking the chief and his brother, Patrick Nemamilwe, through his orange orchard, Nicholson picks some fruit and hands a piece to each of them. “Ninety percent of this citrus goes for export,” he says, as the men pull off the rinds, spraying juice. “We even supply to Wal-Mart.”

“And this farm can create jobs for people here,” says Mr. Nemamilwe, a recent college graduate in agriculture. Nobody used to think of farming as a decent career, he says, but now that blacks have a chance to own and run large commercial farms, agriculture has become more attractive.

“There are much more than opportunities for digging in the soil, this is a chance to be self-reliant,” says Nemamilwe.

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