The Department of Agriculture has admitted that wealthy landowners are converting South Africa’s farmland into housing developments, eating into the land available to produce food.
Deputy director-general Dipepeneneng Serage told Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Agriculture on Tuesday, 13 October that the department was battling mounting pressure to allow farmland to be used for property development and other purposes.
“People who have made it, people who have money, are now changing their agricultural land into something else, into housing, into other things. And we are busy battling with those,” he said.
Serage said flooding also contributed to the loss of agricultural land, but accounted for a smaller proportion of the problem.
His office receives more than 20 applications a week from landowners seeking to subdivide agricultural land or change its use, he told MPs.
“There are other competing realities in the country that, if allowed, would minimise or reduce the number of hectares from which we produce food in the country,” he said.
Serage warned that South Africans risked losing the land needed to feed the country while developers and wealthy property owners pursued other uses for it.
“You may have beautiful houses and everything else but be hungry if we do not protect the land on which you produce food. Our job is to ensure that we do not lose the land that we have,” he said.
The department can still reject applications under existing legislation, Serage said, particularly where the land is highly valuable for agriculture or a proposed development would undermine the agricultural character of an area.
“Luckily, if it is agricultural land, we still have the capacity and authority to refuse if the land is of high value or if the land would work negatively against the character of agricultural land in that area,” he said.
MPs from across the political spectrum raised concerns about the conversion of productive farmland into housing estates, shopping centres and other developments.
MK Party MP Bongani Michael Mkongi warned that private buyers were acquiring high-value agricultural land for gated communities and shopping malls at the expense of future food production.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going to have land for ourselves, but we’ll only have land for human settlement, and people will starve and we’ll need to import food,” he said.
DA MP Desiree Van der Walt accused developers of prioritising lucrative housing projects over the country’s food security.
“Developers come around and build massive houses, and there goes food security. Some rich guy or company or whoever comes around and there goes agriculture and make thousands and millions of rands out of housing projects for the wealthy, not for poor people,” she said.
She also questioned whether provincial authorities were enforcing national legislation designed to protect agricultural land.
“It seems like national legislation doesn’t have any value to provinces,” she said.
ANC MP Seaparo Charles Sekoati questioned whether the department’s figures accurately reflected the amount of productive agricultural land remaining in the country.
“From my own perspective, the productive agricultural land is actually shrinking instead of expanding. I’m not even sure whether the hectares of agricultural land that Mr Serage is talking about are still the same size,” he said.
Serage agreed that the country was losing agricultural land.
“You are correct. The land that we farm on is shrinking,” he said.
He told the committee that the official figure for farmed land was approximately 21 million hectares, of which only about 1.5 million hectares were irrigated. The remainder depended on rainfall.
The department also acknowledged that provincial governments lacked the capacity and expertise to implement national legislation protecting agricultural land.
“We know that especially with nationally published laws, the provinces tend not to have capacity or the expertise to handle them,” Serage said.
The government intends to strengthen protections through the Preservation and Development of Agricultural Land Act, which is designed to prevent high-value agricultural land from being diverted to non-agricultural uses, regardless of ownership.
However, the legislation is not yet in force.
The department told MPs it hoped the Act would come into effect by the end of March 2027.
Until then, agricultural land remains subject to the Subdivision of Agricultural Land Act of 1970, leaving the department to rely on existing powers while pressure to convert farmland for development continues.