At the crossroads: Land and agrarian reform in South Africa into the 21st century
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Date
1999
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape
Abstract
The land sector has always been characterised by
lively and public arguments over policy, and some of
the central and recurring themes of the previous five
years of debate were expected to surface at the
conference. One of these is whether or not the ANC
has the political will to seek to radically alter
agrarian power relations and the distribution of
resources that underlies them. The Reconstruction
and Development Programme (RDP) of 1994 called
for a wide-ranging and redistributive land reform2,
portrayed as the central driving force behind a large
scale rural development programme. Since then the
effective displacement of the RDP by the Growth,
Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR)
and the derisory budget for land reform since 1994/
95 (never more than one percent of the total budget)
have called this commitment into question. Is
government s oft-repeated statement that it intends
to eliminate rural poverty (most recently in
President Mbeki s state of the nation address of
February 2000) only a rhetorical gesture?
Description
Keywords
Land reform, Agrarian reform, South Africa, Land rights, Black commercial farmers
Citation
Cousins, B. et al. (1999). At the crossroads: Land and agrarian reform in South Africa into the 21st century. Cape Town: Institute for Poverty Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) University of the Western Cape.