CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa's new agriculture minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said on Tuesday the continent's biggest maize producer would not seize white farms to redistribute to blacks as this would harm its economy.

"With our willing-buyer, willing-seller policy there are times when the land becomes too expensive for the state to purchase, and if we face a programme of expropriation, it would further destabilise the economic industry of agriculture," she told an agribusiness conference in Cape Town.

After the fall of apartheid in 1994, the ruling African National Congress set itself a target of handing 30 percent of all agricultural land to the black majority by 2014.

But progress towards the target has been slow, and only about 4 percent of land has been acquired from private owners amid funding problems that government officials say might hinder the government from meeting its goal.

Land reform is a sensitive issue in Africa's biggest economy, where critics say the programme has hurt investment in the commercial farming sector and drastically reduced the land that is available for commercial agriculture.

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