No plans to seize white farms

Not for the moment anyway. Never is a word one uses trepidly in Africa. For the ANC to do an about face (last year they almost pushed through a forced land expropriation bill) means they've studied the numbers and nothing stirs the regime more than when it begins to hurt - where it matters most: the mighty penny. The diminishing income from agriculture, the fact that we now need to buy food whereas we used to export it, a situation worsening year by year, a future scenario being played out across the Limpopo in Zimbabwe has - for now - trumped ideology. For now. The Left in South Africa won't be quiet long.

But it won't matter anyway. The farmers are leaving. The ANC can see the offers flooding in to white farmers from fellow black nations. This can't be good. People with centuries of knowledge in the farming industry is an irreplaceable treasure no country can afford or ought to lose. And damn good farmers to boot.

This statement is probably intended to reassure the farmers. That's all fine and well but farmers are dying and unless they are protected, more will be killed and more will leave for safer pastures. There's no way to say for certain we will never have food shortages one day. Now that's a never that is certain.

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Agriculture minister says that expropriation would destabilise food production

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa's new agriculture minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said on Tuesday the continent's biggest maize producer would not seize white farms to redistribute to blacks as this would harm its economy.

"With our willing-buyer, willing-seller policy there are times when the land becomes too expensive for the state to purchase, and if we face a programme of expropriation, it would further destabilise the economic industry of agriculture," she told an agribusiness conference in Cape Town.

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the ruling African National Congress set itself a target of handing 30 percent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.

But progress towards the target has been slow, and only about 4 percent of land has been acquired from private owners amid funding problems that government officials say might hinder the government from meeting its goal.

Land reform is a sensitive issue in Africa's biggest economy, where critics say the programme has hurt investment in the commercial farming sector and drastically reduced the land that is available for commercial agriculture.