Hon Deputy Speaker, as I indicated in this House on 22 August, the report of the Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture has been presented to Cabinet and has been made available to the public for comment. Cabinet still needs to finalise its deliberations on the findings and recommendations of the advisory panel. This advisory panel has produced several far-reaching recommendations to ensure that we correct the skewed distribution of land in our country, a necessary precondition to our objective of reducing inequality in our country.
This report recommends legal mechanisms to recognise, to register, to record and to enforce a continuum of land rights, so that all our people become rights holders. The panel has called on government to immediately identify well-located, unused and underutilised pieces of land and buildings for the purpose of urban settlement and to prioritise poor tenants for upgrading their own rights.
In line with this recommendation, Cabinet itself has already taken decisions on the release of land for human
settlements, as I was saying earlier. The advisory panel found that the mechanism of land expropriation without compensation is one of a range of methods that could be utilised to acquire land for the purposes of land reform. It further proposed circumstances in which such expropriation could be considered.
Now, the panel's recommendations complement and reinforce the work being done by the interministerial committee, IMC, on land reform and agriculture. The interministerial committee, which is chaired by the Deputy President, is tasked with co-ordinating and providing political leadership to accelerate land reform. The report of the panel has provided the country with a comprehensive, I believe, and also a just and sustainable approach to land reform.
Cabinet is therefore determined to finalise shortly its considerations of the recommendations so that the land reform process can proceed at a faster rate and have greater impact. It is therefore necessary not only to address the plight of the landless in our country but to boost the economy to create jobs and reduce poverty,
particularly in the rural areas of South Africa. I thank you, hon Deputy Speaker.