A panel of lawmakers in South Africa has recommended changes to the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation.
More than two decades after the end of apartheid, most private land remains in the hands of the country's white minority. But observers at home and abroad have warned of the potential economic impact of the move.
Parliament's Constitutional Review Committee said the planned amendment would make it explicitly clear that expropriation could be carried out to accelerate land reform.
"South Africans have spoken, loud and clear, and we listened to their cry," the committee's co-chairman Lewis Nzimande said in a statement on Thursday.
The recommendation will now go to the national assembly. It is not clear when a vote will take place.
People make submissions before a land expropriation hearing in Cape Town, August 4, 2018. /VCG Photo
Parliament set the ball rolling in February to hasten the transfer of land to black ownership by backing a motion calling for the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation, and set up the review team to canvass public opinion.
President Cyril Ramaphosa's ruling African National Congress has made the acceleration of land redistribution a key issue ahead of 2019 elections, unnerving investors despite pledges to do so in a way that does not threaten food security or growth.
Agri SA, an association of agricultural associations, criticized Thursday's recommendation, saying the amendment would be diametrically opposed to the protection of property rights and would gravely harm the economy.
The move was "reckless and populist" and Agri SA would challenge it, its president Dan Kriek said.
A senior World Bank group executive also warned on Wednesday that the move risked putting off investors.
"If you create uncertainty of some aspects of your environment, and land tenure is one of them, that is one aspect that investors will be looking at," Sergio Pimenta, the vice president for the Middle East and Africa at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank's private investment arm, told Reuters.
"The land issue is a complex issue," he said. "Whatever the solution the government is looking at, creating an environment that is reliable, that is certain, is important," he said.
Speaking in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ramaphosa told the European Parliament that South Africa would enact land reforms in line with its constitution and with respect for the human rights of all its people.
(Top picture: A worker checks on cattle grazing on the Ehlerskroon farm, outside Delmas in the Mpumalanga province, South Africa, September 13, 2018. /VCG Photo)