Research Articles (PLAAS)

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Browsing by Subject "Agrarian reform"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Real acts, imagined landscapes: reflections on the discourses of land reform in South Africa after 1994
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) du Toit, Andries
    This paper discusses the discourses by which land reform policies in South Africa have been justified and criticized. Critical thought is needed about the underlying assumptions and frameworks informing policy and critique. While key aspects of populist, ‘Left’ and liberal ideologies helped mobilize support for land reform after 1994, they framed questions of equitable transformation and justice in ways that obscured the terrain of struggle rather than revealing it. The broad consensus on the legitimacy of land reform in the initial decade after 1994 was underpinned by narratives about redress and reconciliation that privileged reparative justice above distributive equity. It tended to obscure the complex trade-offs and impacts involved in implementation. Coherent policy-making was further undermined by simplistic oppositions between ’market’ and ‘rights-based’ approaches that often led to ill-targeted policies. Land and agrarian reform needs to be liberated from this symbolic burden. It should be informed by an understanding of the nature of inequality in South Africa and the contribution that agrarian change can make to reducing it.
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    Revisiting unresolved questions: land, food and agriculture
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2011) Hall, Ruth
    This article explores three articles from the perspective of 2011. They are Makhosazane Gcabashe and Alan Mabin’s ‘Preparing to negotiate the land question’ (Transformation 11), Tom Bennett’s ‘Human rights and the African cultural tradition’ (Transformation 22) and Henry Bernstein’s ‘Food security in a democratic South Africa’ (Transformation 24). The author focuses on four themes: the politics of negotiations; the location of ‘rights’ in land and to custom; the political economy of agrarian change; and the multiple facets of the ‘land question’. In conclusion, it draws attention to enduring questions about how to confront agrarian dualism, dynamics of changing and deepening inequality in the countryside, tensions between the logic underpinning land and agricultural policies, and the need to recast agrarian change in a wider frame, in recognition of the profound ways in which what happens in South Africa’s rural areas are part of regional and global dynamics.
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    Smallholder irrigation schemes, agrarian reform and ‘accumulation from above and from below’ in South Africa
    (Wiley & Blackwell Publishing, 2013) Cousins, Ben
    A key issue in debates on agrarian reform in South Africa is the potential for small-scale farming, in conjunction with redistributive land reform, to make a significant contribution to employment creation and poverty reduction. Two problems hinder these debates – the paucity of reliable data on small-scale agriculture, and lack of clarity on the meaning of terms such as ‘smallholder’ and ‘small-scale farmer’. This paper applies class-analytic perspectives on social differentiation to critically examine these terms, and explores the prospects for ‘accumulation from above and from below’ through agrarian reform, drawing on wider debates within the Southern African region. It focuses in particular on smallholder irrigation schemes, potentially a key focus of policy, and presents research findings on production and marketing of fresh produce in one such scheme in Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu-Natal. Survey data show that farming households combine agriculture and various forms of off-farm labour, as is often the case throughout the region, and that accumulation in small-scale agriculture is constrained by a number of factors, including the inherited and largely untransformed agrarian class structure of South Africa. In this context, expanded access to land and water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such accumulation; wider structural change is also required.