More money is allocated for land reform in Finance Minister Trevor Manuel's budget announced on Wednesday.

Altogether another R2,6bn over and above last year's Medium Term Expenditure Framework, is to be spent on reform and agricultural support programmes.

The 5,083 outstanding land restitution claims will get an additional R1bn over the three-year medium term expenditure period. And an additional R260mn is to be given to Alexkor to establish a viable mining operation that will be jointly owned with the Richtersveld community, giving effect to the settlement of the restitution claim, which was concluded last year.

The Budget Review says that both human and financial resources are now being shifted to speed up the pace of land redistribution. The government has delivered about four million hectares of land to historically disadvantaged beneficiaries, and the target is to redistribute 21m hectares by 2014.

"A further R900m is allocated for this purpose over the medium term," the review says.

"The total budget for land reform increases from R1,6bn in 2007/08 to R4,1bn in 2010/11."

Side by side with this expansion, more money is to be spent on teaching the beneficiaries how to farm the land they get. Agricultural extension services receive an additional R500m over the medium term, through the provinces, and 5,000 new extension officers are to be recruited to provide agricultural advice and production assistance.

Asked at a media conference on Wednesday morning about why he was not giving more money to fund land reform, Manuel said that if the Treasury gave R200bn for redistribution, farmers would find scruffy pieces of land in the Kalahari and sell them for R100m each.

Second and more seriously, he said that the Treasury looked at the capacity of the Land Affairs Department to handle redistribution and decided that the amount proposed was all they could handle. - Michael Hamlyn, I-Net Bridge

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