Acting chief land claims commissioner Andrew Mphela has once again misrepresented the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) and sought to deny the vast body of evidence that the land reform process is failing.
CDE supports land reform and sees it as an important part of South Africa’s economic renewal.
At the end of the Sunday Times’s devastating, independent exposé of failures, “Farms collapse as land reform fails” (March 1), Mphela chose to scapegoat CDE’s supposed “self-proclaimed experts” on land reform, saying that our findings — depressingly corroborated in the same story by independent journalists — are “baseless”, “frivolous” and “vexatious”.
CDE employed the country’s leading experts over several years, and tested their conclusions several times over, before publishing the sobering results in its May 2008 report, Land Reform in South Africa — Getting back on track.
Any serious reader would appreciate that CDE supports land restitution and redistribution and was extremely worried by the inescapable findings of widespread failure.
The tragic stories of “assets dying in the hands of the poor”, as the director-general of land affairs has described it, are just a tip of the iceberg of opportunities lost through a failed process.
CDE’s research on land reform has been praised in parliament and by many in the agricultural sector; while it paints a worrying picture of actual land reform results to date, it offers a feasible way forward.
Mphela has yet again failed to engage seriously with CDE’s research findings or dispute our conclusions that land reform, and especially restitution, is in disarray and that the future of major components of South African agriculture is now seriously threatened.
CDE stands by our call for the urgent establishment of an action-oriented partnership that addresses previous injustices around land in an economically viable way.
— Ann Bernstein, executive director, CDE and Jeff McCarthy, CDE research director, land reform project - The Times
CDE supports land reform and sees it as an important part of South Africa’s economic renewal.
At the end of the Sunday Times’s devastating, independent exposé of failures, “Farms collapse as land reform fails” (March 1), Mphela chose to scapegoat CDE’s supposed “self-proclaimed experts” on land reform, saying that our findings — depressingly corroborated in the same story by independent journalists — are “baseless”, “frivolous” and “vexatious”.
CDE employed the country’s leading experts over several years, and tested their conclusions several times over, before publishing the sobering results in its May 2008 report, Land Reform in South Africa — Getting back on track.
Any serious reader would appreciate that CDE supports land restitution and redistribution and was extremely worried by the inescapable findings of widespread failure.
The tragic stories of “assets dying in the hands of the poor”, as the director-general of land affairs has described it, are just a tip of the iceberg of opportunities lost through a failed process.
CDE’s research on land reform has been praised in parliament and by many in the agricultural sector; while it paints a worrying picture of actual land reform results to date, it offers a feasible way forward.
Mphela has yet again failed to engage seriously with CDE’s research findings or dispute our conclusions that land reform, and especially restitution, is in disarray and that the future of major components of South African agriculture is now seriously threatened.
CDE stands by our call for the urgent establishment of an action-oriented partnership that addresses previous injustices around land in an economically viable way.
— Ann Bernstein, executive director, CDE and Jeff McCarthy, CDE research director, land reform project - The Times
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