Smallholder irrigation schemes, agrarian reform and ‘accumulation from above and from below’ in South Africa
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Date
2013
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Publisher
Wiley & Blackwell Publishing
Abstract
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.
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Keywords
Accumulation, Agrarian reform, Iirrigation, Small scale farming, South Africa
Citation
Cousins, B. (2013). Smallholder irrigation schemes, agrarian reform and ‘accumulation from above and from below’ in South Africa. Journal of Agrarian Change, 13 (1):116-139