Expropriation Bill | Radio 94.7 FM

A series of proposals such as the possibility of a land tax for farmers and limits on ownership and constitutional amendment were tabled on Sunday by the president’s task force on land reform.

Minister of Agriculture, Land Affairs and Rural Development, Thoko Didiza released the report on Sunday, but without much emphasis on the objections and suggestions by Dan Kriek, president of Agri SA, and mega-farmer Nick Serfontein.

Netwerk 24 reported earlier that the report proposes a constitutional amendment to allow expropriation without compensation under certain circumstances and with strict conditions.

The panel refers to those conditions contained in the Expropriation Bill. These are cases where tenants stay on the ground, where land is kept for speculative purposes only, state-owned land, where the landlord has abandoned the land or where government subsidies to the owner were more than the current market value.

“Only
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Farmers shouldn’t see themselves as an island, President Cyril Ramaphosa told wine farmers and businessmen when his campaign trail took him to the Beyerskloof wine estate outside Stellenbosch.

He said farmers should be part of the solutions facing the country, and they should embrace change.

Ramaphosa said South African farmers were really good, but that the country also came from a “very sad history, a terrible history, particularly on issues of the land”.

He said, as he did in his State of the Nation Address last year, that land was South Africa’s original sin.

“It happened when Jan van Riebeeck first set foot here,” Ramaphosa said.

“The future is a good future if we all work together.”

The solution was not to be isolationist, he said.

According to Ramaphosa, individual farmers found ways to address the “horrible past” and include their wor
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