Minister Considers Stopping All New Golf Estates And Game Farms


Sunday Times (Johannesburg)

August 7, 2005
Posted to the web August 7, 2005

Prega Govender
Johannesburg

LAND AFFAIRS Minister Thoko Didiza is considering a moratorium on new game farms and golf estates.

This follows the adoption of a resolution supporting the shelving of "elitist" developments, which was unanimously endorsed by more than 1 000 delegates at the National Land Summit last month, including by officials from the Agriculture and Land Affairs Department.


Land Affairs director-general Glen Thomas said Didiza would consider the resolution and canvass farmers and affected communities as there was "growing public concern" over the "alarming rate" at which foreigners were snapping up land to develop golf estates in the coastal regions of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

Professor Shadrack Gutto, head of a committee appointed by Didiza to investigate foreign land ownership, said a verification process would take place shortly to ascertain the number of golf estates and game farms owned by foreigners.

A "significant number" of the 123 game farms in KwaZulu-Natal are owned by foreigners, according to a report commissioned by the Association for Rural Advancement (Afra).

But the call for a moratorium on new game farms has outraged the country's commercial farming sector.

There are about 9 300 game farms in South Africa, covering about 17.5 million hectares.

Stewart Dorrington, president of the Professional Hunters' Association of SA, described the resolution as "outrageous". He said the industry brought more than R1-billion in foreign revenue into the country every year.

"The average spend per client is about $18 500. Between 6 000 and 9 000 trophy hunters visit South Africa every year."

Lourie Bosman, president of AgriSA, which represents about 35 000 farmers, described the recommendation as "short-sighted", saying it would cripple the industry if the government acted on it.

The president of the National African Farmers' Union, Motsepe Matlala, said his organisation supported the resolution, but the impact of golf estates and game farms on the land reform process should be investigated.

A spokesman for the Game Ranching Association of South Africa, Gary van den Berg, said the resolution indicated a "lack of knowledge and understanding" of game farming.

Van den Berg said one foreign hunter's stay in the country was equivalent to six to eight other tourists. "The hunting industry is so lucrative that you can't get a trophy out of a taxidermist in under a year. They are so busy. "

Van den Berg said game farms employed three times the number of workers employed by farmers of cattle and other livestock.

But the Afra report said there was little to substantiate the belief that the tourism-conservation sector had proved to be a saviour for poor communities.

Angela Conway, director of the Southern Cape Land Committee NGO, said the southern and western Cape were magnets for wealthy foreigners.

"German company Plattner Golf owns Fancourt. A group of Belgians have bought large tracts of land in Plettenberg Bay, and two forests in Knysna have been sold to a German company, Steinhoffs," she said.

"Nowhere is the disparity between the super-rich and the poor more apparent than in the western and southern Cape."

At least 35 new applications for the development of multimillion-rand luxury golf estates have been made to the Western Cape provincial government.

The Northern Cape MEC for Agriculture and Land Reform, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, said that, although the purchase of prime agricultural land for game farms was good for tourism, concerns were raised that it was owned by "an elitist minority".


A report commissioned by Western Cape's Department of Environmental Affairs to investigate the impact of golf estates found that at least 22 of the proposed developments in the province would result in the loss of prime agricultural land.

At least 35 new applications for the development of multi-million rand luxury golf estates have been made to the Western Cape provincial government alone.

So although there are quite a few people ( doomsayers) always saying dont invest in South Africa for one reason or another, investment in South Africa is still alive and in good heath it seems // especially for foreigners with disposible dollars or euros.

That cry about trying to stop new investment will fail, that exact same scenario is not only relavent to SA. Here in NZ we continually get the local people and local blinkered politicians crying out against foreigners coming in and buying up land and prime resort locations.

In this world of trouble uncertainty and strife (people with money and lifestyle choices) seem to fall back on land purchases often in exotic countries where they find local prices and the cost of living to be very low by their own standards and the value of their currencies.

Some people will always sit back and moan about the world and this and that country being a risk when we know in this day and age those sitting pretty in the developed world are not now as secure as they once thought they were, so be careful when critisizing places like SA and Southern Africa in general, as who knows when you may be unsafe and under security concerns in your comfortable neck of the woods. No country is now totally safe any more either for investment or for your security

Regards, Peter

A highly qualified individual Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza

I wonder if Ms. Didiza lives on a 40 acre subsistence farm and drives a mule-drawn cart? More likely, she lives in a nice house (with servants) and drives a Mercedes. Not bad for a former secretary. Maybe she should be considered one of the "elite". Oh sorry, she has the wrong skin color. What they want to stop are the "elite white" golfers and hunters.

I really thought RSA would be the cornerstone of southern Africa, but it looks like is going the same direction as all the others.

Regards,

Terry

Terry: South Africa WAS the cornerstone of africa, just give it a few more years and it'll be just as great as Zimbabwe under Mugabe. jorge