Land rights are a politically fraught issue across southern Africa, and South Africa is no exception. Even one of the sectors that pioneered land redistribution – the sugar industry – has been caught up in what it says is a slow and bureaucratic process that is threatening future production.
The sugar industry is geographically concentrated, mainly in KwaZulu-Natal, and operates as a coherent system thanks to the fact that all sugar cane goes through the same mills. Sugar producers say it was therefore relatively easy to take a proactive, collective approach to contribute to the government’s target of redistributing 30 per cent of land to disadvantaged farmers by 2014.
