Minister Considers Stopping All New Golf Estates And Game Farms

Sunday Times (Johannesburg)

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.

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