Very often, debates about land policy in South Africa focus on complex technical matters — how land should be expropriated, what kinds of support structures are needed — without paying enough heed to the underlying question of why we are doing land reform in the first place. Recent proposals by conservative agricultural economist Johann Kirsten are a case in point, arguing for approaches to land reform that will streamline the transfer of land to middle sized, well capitalised farmers. In a recent article for the Daily Maverick PLAAS’s Prof Ben Cousins takes a dim view of this approach. The purpose of land reform has to be to fundamentally change the agrarian structure inherited from the past. “At present, a small minority of mainly white farmers own an overwhelming proportion of rural land, but provide a declining number of decent jobs. These facts are politically unacceptable. If not addressed, they risk delegitimising the post-apartheid political order in its entirety.”
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