LANDLESS PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT

PRESS STATEMENT

"LPM WELCOMES RESTITUTION ELECTION PROMISES,

BUT STILL TOO LITTLE TOO LATE"

The Landless People's Movement (LPM) - an independent national movement of poor and landless people struggling for land and agrarian reform - welcomes the announcement that the government plans to return 232,000 hectares of land to the poor and landless through the land restitution programme before the elections.

The LPM welcomes all moves to speed up the delivery of land reform, and notes that the government's commitment to deliver in four months almost 50 percent of what it has delivered in the past 10 years provides strong proof that land reform in post-apartheid South Africa is possible. Such a dramatic increase in this short space of time also clearly supports the LPM's contention - made to Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza in our meeting with her on 10 January - that the past 10 years of the land reform programme have been an abject failure.

While the LPM applauds any moves to speed up land reform delivery, we must also note that the pace of this election-road land reform windfall cannot be sustained according to current budgets without a fundamental reorientation of the land reform programme to free us from the proscriptions of the World Bank market-led "willing seller-willing" buyer model. The LPM again calls on the government to host an urgent national and representative Land Summit where these fundamental constraints can be reviewed so the momentum of election-road delivery enthusiasm can lead directly to a sustainable programme of rapid, comprehensive land and agrarian reform.

232,000 hectares is welcome, but it still leaves 22.37-million hectares left to go on the 1994 promise of 30% of agricultural land that was due in 1999, and even more to reach an equitable land distribution in South Africa. In the meantime, even these gains are being eroded as we face ongoing farm evictions and urban forced removals in the absence of the moratorium on forced removals and evictions that we have demanded for several years.

The LPM sincerely hopes that the message of poor and landless people's impatience with the continuing failure of the current programme, which we will deliver through our active abstention from the coming polls through our "No Land! No Vote!" campaign, will be heard and answered by a new government commitment to fundamental land and agrarian reform policy change negotiated with the poor and landless majority at an urgent Land Summit.

ISSUED BY: THE LANDLESS PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT ON 16 JANUARY, 2004

FOR MORE INFO: CONTACT LPM NATIONAL PROJECTS & EDUCATION OFFICER MAUREEN MNISI ON 084-706-1388.