Occasional Papers Series

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Browsing by Author "Hall, Ruth"

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    Evaluating land and agrarian reform in South Africa : Farm tenure
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2003) Hall, Ruth
    Farm dwellers are among the poorest South Africans. Most have access to residential land only. A minority has access to grazing land for their livestock or to arable land for cultivation, in return for which they may be required to provide their labour. Farm dwellers’ access to land is precarious – until recently farm owners had unrestricted rights to evict farm dwellers – and is often very limited in its extent. It was in response to these conditions that the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) developed, as part of the national land reform programme, policies to secure the tenure rights of farm dwellers. This report investigates to what extent these policies have succeeded in securing the existing tenure of farm dwellers or providing them with long-term secure rights to alternative land. The report describes the intentions of these policies, the mechanisms created to give effect to them, and the experience in enforcing these new rights. Also discussed are the special rights accorded to labour tenants and the application processes available to labour tenants who want to become owners of the land they use. The report assesses the extent to which the outcomes and impacts of these policies have met their objectives and have realised the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Finally, the report reflects on future challenges and extracts lessons from experience that need to inform future approaches to securing farm dwellers’ rights.
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    Evaluating land and agrarian reform in South Africa : Final Report
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2003) Hall, Ruth; Jacobs, Peter; Lahiff, Edward
    Land dispossession was a key feature of racism under colonial rule and apartheid in South Africa. More than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed in the period 1960 to 1983 alone, through homeland consolidation, removals from ‘black spots’ and the Group Areas Act. One result of massive dispossession is the concentration of poverty in South Africa’s rural areas, where about 70% of the population lives below the poverty line (May 1998). The prospect of democracy in the 1990s raised expectations that the dispossessed would be able to return to their land, but the terms on which political transition was negotiated constrained how this could happen. Despite calls for a radical restructuring of social relations in the countryside, the constitutional negotiations on the protection of property rights, and on the economy more broadly, ensured that land reform would be pursued within the framework of a market-led land reform model, as advocated by the World Bank and implemented in countries such as Brazil, Colombia and Zimbabwe.
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    Evaluating land and agrarian reform in South Africa : Land redistribution
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2003) Jacobs, Peter; Lahiff, Edward; Hall, Ruth
    Land dispossession during the colonial era and the decades of apartheid rule produced a highly unequal pattern of land ownership and widespread rural poverty in South Africa. When a democratically elected government came to power in 1994, it adopted a land reform programme to address the problems inherited from the past and the challenge of development in the rural areas. The land reform programme of the South African government is conventionally described as having three legs: restitution, tenure reform and redistribution. While restitution deals specifically with historical rights in land, and tenure reform with forms of land holding, redistribution is specifically aimed at transforming the racial pattern of land ownership.
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    Evaluating land and agrarian reform in South Africa : Rural restitution
    (Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2003) Hall, Ruth
    During the negotiated transition to democracy, many South Africans expected that liberation would bring the return of land they had been dispossessed of under colonialism and apartheid, but the terms on which the transition was negotiated constrained the parameters of how this could happen. The African National Congress (ANC) did not advocate nationalisation of land at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (Codesa) constitutional negotiations and later adopted a willing buyer-willing seller approach to land reform. Both the ‘interim’ Constitution of 1993 and the ‘final’ Constitution of 1996 guaranteed the protection of existing property rights, while also placing clear responsibility on the state to implement land reforms. The aim of the restitution programme is to restore land rights or provide other redress to those unfairly dispossessed since the introduction of the Natives Land Act 27 of 1913. Restitution is to address the loss of land rights that resulted from homeland consolidation, forced removals from ‘black spots’, the Group Areas Act and related laws that designated land on a racial basis. Between 1960 and 1983 alone, an estimated 3.5 million people were forcibly removed (Platzky & Walker 1985:9–12). As acknowledged in the White Paper on South African Land Policy, ‘[f]orced removals in support of racial segregation have caused enormous suffering and hardship in South Africa and no settlement of land issues can be reached without addressing such historical injustices’ (DLA 1997:28).