CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The South African government has seized a 600,000-acre game and cattle farm from its owners, the Lutheran Evangelical Church of Southern Africa, and will divide the land among poor rural communities, ministers said Thursday.The seizure comes amid an intensified drive by the government to redistribute land to black and mixed-race communities that were dispossessed by apartheid. An estimated four-fifths of South Africa’s land remains in the hands of the affluent white minority.

Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana said the government plans to push through new legislation to simplify the confiscation process and set up a new body with powers to acquire land for poor farmers. She said the Cabinet would also consider proposed regulations on land ownership by foreigners in the coming weeks.

A new tax on big landowners to “encourage” them to “share” with the landless and homeless was also a possibility, she said.

“The urgency of accelerating land reform demands that we look at not just one strategy,” Xingwana told a news conference.

The government wants disadvantaged black and mixed-race communities to own 30 percent of the country’s agricultural land by 2014 to ease the crushing rural poverty that is causing an exodus of people to move into the cities.

However, Xingwana told journalists that there would be no land grabs like those in neighbouring Zimbabwe. In the last seven years, that country’s government has seized thousands of white-owned commercial farms — sometimes violently — contributing to its worst economic crisis since independence.

“It does not mean that we will expropriate and forget the people who previously owned the land,” Xingwana said.

“We will still do so according to the law, within the constitution of South Africa and we will be paying market values.”

The South African government carried out its first expropriation on Tuesday, seizing a 600,000-acre game and cattle farm near the mining town of Kimberly that was owned by the Lutheran Evangelical Church of Southern Africa.

The church had already sold 3,500 head of game in anticipation of the move but had protested to the government that the confiscation was unnecessary given it had bought the land to help poor workers during the apartheid era.

“We have no problem in transferring the land to the people,” said Bongani Zulu, general treasurer of the church.

Although the two parties had agreed on a price of $4.5 million for the land in 2005, talks snagged on the church’s insistence that the sale contract contain a clause committing the state to pay interest in case of long delays in payment.

The Agriculture Ministry refused, saying this would have set a dangerous precedent.

The government had already paid 80 percent of the purchase price into the church’s bank account but had not indicated when it would release the balance, Zulu said. He said the church hasn’t decided whether to challenge the expropriation in court.

Xingwana, the Land Affairs minister, refused to say how many more farms were likely to be confiscated. She said farmers were more willing than in the past to discuss selling their land to the government and not make unrealistic price demands.

“There is a turnaround. There is a lot of good will. Many more have come around to the negotiating table,” she said.

Another central plank of the government’s policy is to return ancestral lands to people who were evicted under apartheid. Some 79,000 evicted families and communities have lodged claims since 1994, with about 6,000 yet to settle.

The government has accused those farm owners of dragging their feet in the hope market values will rise. Xingwana said she wants to settle all remaining land claims by 2009 and impose a six-month limit on negotiations.