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Browsing by Author "PLAAS"

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ANC election manifesto in relation to rural development and land reform
(PLAAS, 2009-06) PLAAS
In the last 15 years the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) has set out to achieve many things but, by its own admission, has been unsuccessful in meeting its objectives for land reform. Hence a few questions arise. Is land reform failing? With a new administration in place, is it possible to influence a new rural vision to transform the imbalances in the countryside with clearer and achievable alternatives for sustainable agrarian reform under the ambit of the ANC’s renewed focus on rural development and agrarian reform? Does the shift in the institutional arrangements provide an opportunity to assess the possibilities for a new direction for land reform and agriculture?
Annual report 2000
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2001) PLAAS
The Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) focuses on the land restitution and redistribution programmes initiated by the post-apartheid democratic state; land tenure reform; emerging regimes of natural resource management; rural livelihoods and farm-household production systems; chronic poverty and rural development; and processes of institutional restructuring and reorientation in support of land and agrarian reform in South Africa. The main activities of PLAAS are research, support to national policy development, training, post-graduate teaching, commissioned evaluation studies, and advisory and facilitation services. The university’s mission statement commits it to ‘responding in critical and creative ways to the needs of a society in transition’, and to ‘helping build an equitable and dynamic society’– commitments taken very seriously by staff at PLAAS. The year 2000 saw our researchers beginning to engage with policy on land and local government reform in a more public manner than in the past (when they tended to do so in ‘backroom’ and advisory roles), and to adopt a more adversarial stance towards government.
Annual report 2001
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2002) PLAAS
PLAAS continues to grow and to take on new projects and staff. This presents a number of challenges, not least of which is the sustainability of such growth. The year 2001 saw the completion of a twelve month-long ‘organisational change process’ which addressed key issues of institutional sustainability. This resulted in new governance and management structures, revised salary scales and conditions of service in line with those of the university, and staff contracts that offer a degree of security of tenure despite the vicissitudes of external donor funding. By the end of the year most of the new systems and procedures were in operation, bringing a sense of solid foundations and greater stability. One of our innovations was to cluster researchers and projects into ‘focus areas’ co-ordinated by senior researchers. We hope that this will facilitate more effective links between individual projects, encourage coherence in our research, training and policy engagement, and facilitate strategic planning. The five focus areas are: land reform; agro-food regimes; community-based natural resource management (CBNRM); rural governance; and chronic poverty and development policy. A major new focus for PLAAS in 2001 was the post-graduate teaching programme. Twelve students registered for the Post-Graduate Diploma in Land and Agrarian Studies, eleven completed the year, and three qualified to proceed to the MPhil. The teaching programme is carried out in collaboration with a number of other institutions and university teaching departments, giving it a truly multi-disciplinary character.
Annual report 2002
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2003) PLAAS
The year 2002 was an extremely busy one for PLAAS staff, and saw the initiation of many new projects and activities, some of them qualitatively different to anything undertaken before. These included an in-depth, national review of the land reform programme, and the release of several media briefings that summarise research findings on poverty in the Western Cape. Others were the co-hosting of a continent-wide networking programme on land and resource rights, and lobbying and advocacy in relation to a proposed new law, the Communal Land Rights Bill. These indicate that PLAAS is only just beginning to realise its potential to combine rigorous academic research, effective communication of research findings, highly-focused policy advocacy, and effective networking in support of African research and policy advocacy. Research highlights of the year include the initiation of a project to evaluate national land and agrarian reform policies and their impacts since 1994. Ruth Hall and Dr Peter Jacobs were recruited to undertake this research and made impressive progress in relation to this ambitious and challenging task. Other important new projects that began in 2002 included Dr Thembela Kepe’s research on HIV/AIDS and land-based livelihoods, and the multi-disciplinary and international KNOWFISH project on the informational needs and institutional structures for effective fisheries co-management, co-ordinated by Dr Mafa Hara.
Annual report 2003
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2004) PLAAS
Applied social science researchers generally want to see their research influence policy and practice; those of a more activist bent seek to ‘change the world, not simply to interpret it’.1 In its mission statement PLAAS envisages a strong connection between its research projects and processes of policy development and advocacy. To this end we are guided by clear values and a commitment to ‘social change that empowers the poor, builds democracy and enhances sustainable development… gender equity is integral to these goals’ (PLAAS mission statement). It is relatively easy to reach agreement on a general statement of this kind, but applying and realising this vision is less straightforward. The macro- and micro-politics of policy making and programme implementation are complicated and often highly contested. In addition, PLAAS researchers do not always agree with one other on the content of policy recommendations or on strategies of engagement. They do, however, seek to learn from each other through discussion and debate on a rich and varied range of experiences.
Annual report 2004
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2005) PLAAS
The wider context of our research and training, and the ultimate rationale for establishing and maintaining a centre such as PLAAS, is the key challenge of deeply entrenched poverty, as well as the inequality to which it is inextricably linked. A majority of citizens in South Africa, as in the wider southern African region, are subject to an on-going crisis of livelihood vulnerability, exacerbated by a raging HIV/Aids pandemic. These realities tend to empty formal democracy of substantive content. Poverty and vulnerability are deepest in rural areas where the majority of the region’s population still lives. The greatest concentrations of such poverty are in those areas previously designated exclusively for African settlement, the former ‘native reserves’, but poverty is also widespread in the commercial farming sector. This sector has always paid extremely low wages, but has been shedding jobs steadily for the past decade, and what jobs survive are largely casual or seasonal in character. Poverty in both contexts has its origins in colonial policies of land acquisition, settlement and economic development that dispossessed the indigenous majority of their land and created dual and highly unequal political, social, legal and economic regimes. A similar legacy is found in coastal communities in relation to unequal access to marine and coastal resources.
Annual report 2006-2007
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2008) PLAAS
Over the past two years the contradictions inherent in South Africa’s post-apartheid growth and development path have become increasingly evident. Growth has not managed to reduce very high levels of unemployment to a significant degree, and large numbers of people remain trapped in structural poverty. The emergence of a growing black middle class has helped reduce inter-racial inequality, but this is small consolation to those with insufficient and insecure incomes who scrape a living in low-wage jobs (sometimes called ‘the working poor’), engage in survivalist micro-enterprises in informal settlements and densely settled rural areas, or depend in large part on social grants. A key question for South Africa is thus: what policies can ensure more inclusive and poverty-reducing forms of economic development?
Annual report 2012
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2013) PLAAS
In much of the global South the instability in global financial systems continued to have dire effects – and there were many worrying signs that the serious food price inflation the world experienced in 2008 would return. In sub-Saharan Africa, policy-makers and investors continued to emphasise that agriculture is central to inclusive economic growth in the region. While this was accompanied by much optimistic talk about the supposed benefits of a ‘green revolution’ in Africa, it is unclear whether many of the projected investments will materialise. In the absence of an understanding of the complex political economy of inequality and hunger in the region, it is unlikely that technical fixes alone will reduce poverty. In South Africa, there was modest progress in the management of poverty but no success in addressing the root causes of massive structural unemployment and inequality. Land, agrarian and rural development policy continued to languish in the doldrums. There was little clarity about the status of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform’s disappointing 2011 Green Paper; there were significant doubts about the long-term implementability and scalability of the Comprehensive Rural Development Plan, and controversial proposals embodied in the Traditional Courts Bill caused widespread concern.
Annual report 2014
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2015) PLAAS
Very often, in our work at PLAAS, we encounter two common misunderstandings about what it is that we do and why it is important. One common misunderstanding is that we are some sort of technical agricultural education institute, concerned in a general way with improving the productivity of small farmers or supporting processes of rural modernisation. Another is that we are concerned with rural issues, narrowly conceived – addressing the ‘injustices of the past’, or the land rights of distant and isolated rural communities: commercial land-owners versus farm tenants, for example, or ‘traditional leaders’ and people living on communal land. Issues, in other words, that are not of direct relevance to the modern, urban world of Southern Africa’s cities and rapidly changing economies.
Annual report 2015
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2016) PLAAS
The year 2015 was a momentous one for PLAAS. It marked twenty years since the day that PLAAS started off as an organisation with some generous start-up funding from the Ford Foundation. PLAAS started life small: initially it was conceptualised as an academic programme within the School of Government, and comprised only two members of staff: Ben Cousins (who had been seconded from the Department of Social Anthropology) and a postgraduate student, Thembela Kepe. (I joined a month later, and became the third member of staff). The new unit was quite disconnected from the University of the Western Cape (UWC)’s academic mainstream, operating out of cramped and poorly lit basement offices in what had been the Department of Coloured Affairs in Voortrekker Road, Bellville. It was modest in its aims and narrowly focused, being concerned mostly with providing policy advice and backup to the newly created Department of Land Affairs. It seemed a fragile creature, unable to pay for researcher salaries from the University coffers, and therefore entirely reliant on donor funding for most of its staffing requirements. I still recall a visiting UK anthropologist and well-known development scholar (no names!) telling me bluntly over tea one day that given any realistic model of organisational viability, PLAAS had no chance: ‘I am sorry to say this’, this person said, ‘but I give you about three years’.
Beyond populism or paralysis: a real debate on South Africa’s land reform trajectory
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2011) PLAAS
On 24 October 2011 the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) convened a public dialogue on South Africa’s land reform trajectory at Townhouse Hotel and Conference Centre in Cape Town. Present were a wide range of actors from researchers and academics, social movements and civil society, the private sector and provincial government. The aim of the session was to engage in informed and constructive dialogue around the issues concerning land reform and rural development with an immediate objective to work towards alternative proposals for a new legislative framework on Land Reform in South Africa. An envisaged output in the short term was a joint, or several collaborative formal comments on the Green Paper on Land Reform recently released by the Department for Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR), to be submitted before the 25 November deadline.
Biennial report 2016-2017
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2018) PLAAS
Besides research and postgraduate teaching, PLAAS undertakes training, provides advisory, facilitation and evaluation services and is active in the field of national policy development. Through these activities, and by seeking to apply the tools of critical scholarship to questions of policy and practice, we seek to develop new knowledge and fresh approaches to the transformation of society in Southern Africa. Our mission emphasises the central importance of the agro-food system in creating and perpetuating poverty — and also in eradicating it. For much of our existence, our work has concentrated heavily on issues of production in these systems. But our focus is broadening to consider crucial issues in land governance, agricultural production, tenure insecurity, the informal economy and social policy. Within this broad field of investigation, our work focuses on the dynamics of marginalised livelihoods — particularly livelihoods which are vulnerable, structurally excluded or incorporated into broader economic systems on adverse terms. In this respect, we have considerable expertise in analysing land- and agriculture-based livelihoods of farm workers; small and subsistence farmers; those pertaining to coastal and inland artisanal fisheries and fishing communities; and the informally self-employed in rural as well as urban areas.
'Celebrating ten years of research, training and policy engagement on land and agrarian reform, livelihoods, community-based natural resource management, and poverty'. A ten year review report 1995-2005
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2006) PLAAS
The Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Over the last ten years we have undertaken research on land and agrarian reform, the changing composition of livelihoods and poverty dynamics in both rural and urban contexts, rural governance, community-based natural resource management, fisheries management, and linkages between land and water rights. All of our work has had a strong applied dimension, and PLAAS researchers have often engaged in policy debates and argued strongly in favour of particular objectives and ways to achieve them. Recurring themes within PLAAS research are patterns of poverty and inequality, the character and distribution of property rights, and contested power relations, all of which are central to the task of socioeconomic transformation after apartheid. These are complex aspects of social reality, and understanding their structure and the underlying causal processes at work is extremely challenging. We have striven to balance our concern for policy relevance and our commitment to social change with a strong emphasis on rigorous and theoretically well-informed scholarship. We have also developed a post-graduate teaching programme in land and agrarian studies, the only one of its kind in the region, and delivered a wide range of short training courses for government officials and NGO workers. In celebrating our 10th anniversary this year, we will be reflecting on whether or not we manage to live up to our mission, and asking what key questions and issues we should address in the decade to come.
Civil society advocacy for an amendment to the KwaZulu-Natal Cemeteries and Crematoria Act
(PLAAS, 2005-11) PLAAS
Welcome to the fourth issue of Umhlaba Wethu, the update on land and agrarian reform in South Africa from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. With the recent National Land Summit, South Africa’s Land Reform Programme came under public debate (see page 2). The slow progress of land reform was highlighted by both government and civil society and debate primarily focused on whether this is due to the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ approach. The resolution to abandon this approach was welcomed by many of the landless, but what it means in terms of government’s strategy is still unclear.
Comments on the green paper on land reform 2011
(Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), 2011) PLAAS
This document is a joint submission by researchers at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies in response to the Green Paper on Land Reform released by the Minister for Rural Development and Land Reform on 30 August 2011. It is a broad response commenting on a range of crucial issues facing land reform in South Africa. It is informed by 15 years of research and policy engagement on the part of PLAAS researchers.
Different realities and narrow responses in a shifting agricultural system
(PLAAS, 2013-09) PLAAS
Protests by farm workers in De Doorns in the Hex River Valley of the Western Cape in November 2012 – and the subsequent responses by organised agriculture, as well as attempts by unions to support the workers –illustrate the complexities of a defective agricultural sector with little effective state attention given to its inequities. The protests, sparked by frustrations over wages as low as R69 per day, also emphasised the uneasy history of labour relations in the agricultural sector and brought to light different versions of realities, which were subsequently hotly contested by both labour and large scale commercial agriculture. The agricultural industry as a whole went through major shifts since the marketing of agricultural goods was deregulated and markets were liberalised in the 1990s. Further changes in the fiscal treatment of agriculture led to the substantial reduction in the direct budgetary expenditure. Research (Barrientos and Visser, 2012) indicates that these shifts had a differentiated impact and, for export orientated farmers, the playing field was not level and it manifested with varying consequences, which allowed some farmers to remain competitive while others struggle to survive or have been forced out of agriculture – the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The progressive deepening of inequalities between (white) producers and (black) workers is as intricate in these shifts as it is a legacy prior to these shifts. Despite progressive labour legislation and regulations in the 1990s for wider and stronger rights for farm workers, as well as expectations of protected tenure and employment rights, it had little impact in the light of the state’s failure to enforce these regulations and in a context of job shedding and mechanisation.
Evictions from farms – the role of local government
(PLAAS, 2011-06) PLAAS
Recently, land reform has gained greater prominence in public debates, notably with the latest call for the nationalisation of land, which has been met with mixed responses. The call highlights why the need for nationalisation of land is being emphasised, and accentuates the lack of transformed land holding patterns in the country. The land reform process has been slow and uneven and many land reform projects have failed. In 2009, Government created a new Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) and committed itself to linking land reform to a broader programme of rural development. Nonetheless, two years later indications are that land reform has not sped up sufficiently to meet its targets or to revive the broader rural economy. Emerging policy proposals - the Land Tenure Security Bill (LTSB) and the Spatial Planning and Land Use Management Bill (SPLUMB) - indicate that policy processes are poorly focused, contradictory and not informed by an adequate analysis of real needs and past problems.
A focus on vulnerability and inequality in national conferences
(PLAAS, 2011-01) PLAAS
Since the national Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) held its National Summit on Vulnerable Workers in Somerset-West outside Cape Town to discuss better conditions for workers in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries industries in July 2011 very little movement on the resolutions had been observed. The summit brought together more than a thousand delegates from across the country and a host of political leadership, including President Jacob Zuma; Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Tina Joemat-Petterson; Cosatu Secretary General Zwelinzima Vavi; Premier Helen Zille and Agri SA President Johannes Möller. The Human Rights Commission report in 2003 and the National Land Summit in 2005 which preceded the 2010 Summit both considered the rights of vulnerable workers and the state of land reform in the country few recommendations by the Human Rights Commission or the resolutions from the land summit had been implemented to date. In the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors the long-standing inadequate protection of workers’ labour, land and resource rights are deeply rooted patterns and these categories of workers remain most vulnerable in the labour sector.
Foreign land ownership under scrutiny
(2004-12) PLAAS
Welcome to the second issue of Umhlaba Wethu, the quarterly update on land and agrarian reform in South Africa from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, based at the University of the Western Cape. Recent months have seen considerable shifts in the debate around land reform in South Africa, although the pace of reform remains a major concern. In October, the National Assembly’s Portfolio Committee on Agriculture and Land Affairs held public hearings on the pace of land reform. Submissions from a wide range of stakeholders highlighted the slow progress in areas such as redistribution and tenure reform, and the enormous challenge posed by rural restitution claims. Calls were made for a substantial increase in the budget available for land reform and for government to use its legal powers of expropriation. Read PLAAS’s submission, which received widespread media attention, at www.uwc.ac.za/plaas and click through to other electronic documents from the hearings.
Insecure tenure and labour – farm dwellers and workers
(PLAAS, 2009-09) PLAAS
This edition of Umhlaba Wethu centres attention on the many challenges farm dwellers and workers experience and continue to face. These challenges reflect in their long pursuit of secured tenure rights and a living wage that will provide a sustainable livelihood. Both the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (ESTA) of 1997 as well as the Sectoral Determination 13: Farm Worker Sector provisions affect farm dwellers and workers. The Farm Sectoral Determination regulates wages, working hours and other basic conditions of employment for farm workers while ESTA promotes tenure security and regulates illegal evictions.

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