AFTER years of squabbles and rancorous legal tussles, white South African farmers are bowing to the inevitable and selling up as the Government accelerates land reforms aimed at redressing apartheid injustices.

Government officials and white farmers’ representatives say that moves to give black farmers a third of white-owned land by 2014 are back on target after the abandonment of the “willing buyer, willing seller” concept.

Ministers accused largely Afrikaner farmers of taking advantage of the scheme — set up to avoid accusations of a Zimbabwe-style land grab — simply to hold out for better prices. In February, they declared that anyone failing to agree a deal within six months faced expropriation.

Tozi Gwanya, the chief lands claims commissioner, said this week that the tougher approach was paying off. “Once we have agreed on the independent valuation and offer it to the landowner, we must not take more than six months to conclude the deal. It is working, they are coming round to the table and there has been a very good response,” he told the AFP news agency.

Mr Gwanya said the Government was determined to settle some 6,969 outstanding land claims by December 2008. Some of the land is reclaimed by blacks who say they were driven off, while other farms have been earmarked as part of a more general redistribution programme.

Twelve years after the end of white minority rule, some 96 per cent of commercially viable farmland remains in white hands, making agriculture the sector by far the most resistant to change. To the outsider, that comes as no surprise. Many rural areas have seen little change since the end of apartheid. White farmers with unashamedly racist views, drive around in pick-up trucks loaded with shabbily-dressed black farm workers.

The two sides have little in common, other than a visceral attachment to the land which both claim as their birthright.

“More than any other white, the Afrikaner farmer is the symbol of white domination. Black officials with roots in the liberation struggle have no common ground with us or liking for us. They want to resettle subsistence farmers on the land for political reasons, they don’t care about output,” one farmer said on condition of anonymity.

The white farmers deny that they are opposed to the new South Africa. Instead, they say that officials involved in the process know nothing about farming and are offering prices which do not treat farms as businesses. They also say they faced long delays before receiving final payment which forced them to dig in their heels.

Chris Jordaan, leader of the radical Transvaal Agricultural Union, said: “Land cuts across every divide — social, cultural, racial, political and ideological. They (government) value land as land, farmers see it as a productive unit and want it valued as such. For them, it is just soil. They don’t understand the difference.”

He said white farmers were now selling because the Government was at last coming up with firm prices. “Farmers know the game is up and so of course they accept.”

Black ownership of all land in South Africa has increased from 13 per cent to 16 per cent since the first black democratic Government came to power in 1994, even though only 10 per cent of the 45 million population is white.

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