LACK of funds, red tape, family disputes over land claims and corrupt government officials colluding with greedy farmers are hampering land reform.

As a result, the target of redistributing 30 percent of white-owned agricultural land to blacks by 2014 will not be met.

A report on land reform presented to a National Assembly portfolio committee revealed that only 5 percent or 5.2 million hectares of white-owned agricultural land had been redistributed in the past 15 years.

To meet the 2014 target, the government has to redistribute another 25 percent or 19 million hectares in the next five years.

`It implies that the department must deliver more than 3 million hectares per annum,` notes the report, presented by two of the committee`s researchers.

The report says the R3.3 billion allocated for land reform in this financial year is far short of the R10.lbn that was requested.

The previous Department of Land Affairs had said it needed about R71bn to meet the 2014 land redistribution target.

Former agriculture and land affairs minister Thoko Didiza warned in 2004 that the government did not have enough money to meet its land reform target, and she proposed a land tax to raise funds to speed up the process.

Other challenges identified in the report included the exorbitant prices charged by some landowners, with some valuing their land at above market rates, and officials colluding with landowners to inflate prices.

This prompted MPs to call for the scrapping of the willing buyer, willing seller principle and to identify and charge corrupt officials.

The report says market-based land reform has failed and suggests expropriation and state interven¬tion to determine property values and drive down prices. .
It says other problems slowing down land reform include a short¬age of skilled staff in the Depart¬ment of

Land Affairs; bureaucracy within the department that slows down the payment of landowners whose land has been marked for redistribution; and a lack of support to land beneficiaries.

Meanwhile, the land restitution programme of resettling people who were dispossessed of their land has settled more than 53 000 of the 79 000 land claims that were lodged by the cut-off date of December 1998, the, report notes.

The government had paid out more than R20bn at the end of March to 155 000 land claimants since the process started, with R5.9bn being paid out to 409 000 claimants in KwaZulu-Natal.

More than 16 000 claims had been settled in the Eastern Cape by the end of March.