By Shaun Benton

Rawsonville - The Western Cape may implement a "development levy" to ensure that some of the benefits from the current property boom go towards the provision of social housing and land transfers to landless black people.

Premier Ebrahim Rasool made this suggestion today when he was delivering a keynote address to delegates from labour, business, NGOs and elsewhere attending the Western Cape Land Summit at a resort in the rural, wineland area of the province.

This comes ahead of a national land summit scheduled to take place later this month in Johannesburg.

The Premier said the land issue was critical in dealing with the claims of those who were removed from their living areas by colonial and apartheid-era legislation such as the infamous Land Act of 1913 and the Group Areas Act of the National Party government.

He said a development levy would be one way to share the proceeds from the property boom in the province. This would help to give the provincial government money to provide housing for the poor and to assist with land transfers.

Mr Rasool said the April targets for land and agriculture set by the provincial government had been exceeded.

"We more than doubled our original target of transferring five thousand hectares ... to over ten and half thousand hectares," Mr Rasool said.

"And we quadrupled the number of beneficiaries to 2020," the premier said.

Earlier, Agriculture MEC Cobus Dowry told delegates that a Farmer Support and Development directorate had replaced an earlier structure, with a massive increase to its budget.

In 2001, the budget for farmer support in the province was R7 million. The directorate serving this sector now had a R79 million budget, and was providing advice to all farmers in the province, but was giving grants only to black farmers.

Under this programme, 63 technical personnel had been appointed to serve the black farmers in the province.

In terms of land reform, Mr Dowry said that a target set in 2002 to achieve 7000 land reform beneficiaries within five years was met in 2005.

A Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme was implemented in April 2004, Mr Dowry said, and received R13 million from the national Department of Agriculture. This was "all spent on black farmers", with at least 70 percent of funds going to land reform beneficiaries".

In addition, R1 billion has been allocated to the national MAFISA scheme, a new credit scheme announced by Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Thoko Didiza, said Mr Dowry.

This has the potential to benefit about 10 million farm and non-farm beneficiaries in South Africa, such as farm workers, household producers, small-scale landowners, food garden producers and rural and micro-entrepreneurs, Mr Dowry said.

He called for everybody with a stake in land in the Western Cape province to use the land summit to raise problems and frustrations over the land issue, and to come up with solutions. - BuaNews