Namibia, close on South Africa's heals, has entered the realm of compulsory land appropriation to speed the distribution of agricultural land to small farmers and to the poor. To use law (a blunt instrument) and arbitrary measures is unnecessary and dangerous. It is the result of policy failure that should be corrected. In South Africa a new economic reform movement, proposes a Land Tax and the Community Investment Programme that, together, provide the land market and the community wherewithal for the small farmer and the poor to enter the land market and to successfully buy additional land for themselves.

Politics and arbitrary actions should not be part of any market operation. Rather, the state can influence a market's general working and it can act to assist certain groups to enter a market on fair or even favourable terms. The Land Tax, only on land and not on improvements, will force under-used, unused and land held for speculation onto the market. It will not punish or inhibit development. The former will swell the supply of land entering the market and so act to lower its price.

Small farmers and poor rural residents need a programme to help them to gain organisation, investment and resource management skills as the prelude to their deciding that it is time they expanded their land base and entered the market to buy land. The Community Investment Programme provides annual Investment Rights to all adults who organise, register Community Development Associations and set up the management conditions needed to invest in and to care for land and other productive resources. Most poor communities can turn a hopeless village into a dynamic investment body because, being poor, they have abundant labour to invest which commercial farmers do not have (see under Ownership in the web page for explanation).

Within a few short years, there will be hundreds, if not thousands of communities that find that to invest where they are is no longer their best option. They will then wish to enter the land market to seek land suited to their ambitions - maybe for just some of the families - near a market, on certain soils or enjoying particular crop conditions. These reform communities will find that, thanks to the Land Tax, there is land to buy at prices they can afford. Government's role is to support, to 'get policy' right and to stand back and 'to see the wood for the trees' so as to improve policy as citizens make their own business decisions. A quiet, optimising, production maintaining agricultural revolution is possible on behalf the small and the poor. But not if government uses arbitrary measures and the blunt instrument of the law to fix its policy and programme failures.

* See the Land and Land Rights section of Pambazuka News for more coverage of this issue.