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Post-apartheid land and agrarian
reform policy and practices in
South Africa: themes, processes
and issues
Paul Hebinck
This book critically examines land and agrarian reform policies in post-apartheid South Africa. Notions of land and agrarian reform are well entrenched in the everyday life of a significant number of people in post-apartheid South Africa, as is evident when one visits government departments and meets policymakers and practitioners, attends academic and policy-oriented seminars, reads newspapers and media reports, or interacts directly with land reform beneficiaries and people in villages. What reform actually means for everyday life, however, varies considerably, as do the ways in which we study and understand land and agrarian reform processes. There are contrasting theoretical frameworks; the field of study is inherently multidisciplinary and complex, and varying experiences of historical events and situations colour our interpretations. Moreover, it is often forgotten that agrarian development policies have been designed and implemented in South Africa since the nineteenth century and that the current crop of policymakers had little or no experience in dealing with land and agrarian reform when the reform process started.
The purpose of the book is neither to provide an extensive review of academic debates, nor to argue that land reform has failed outright to achieve its objectives. Rather, the book aims to set out a number of themes that are drawn from the broader literature on land and agrarian reform as well as from empirical case studies that reconstruct everyday experiences of land and agrarian reform, and how both may inform policy and research agendas. The debates revolve around a number of pertinent issues, informing and shaping the collection of papers brought together in this book. The title of the book – In the Shadow of Policy: Everyday Practices in South African Land and Agrarian Reform – is suggestive of its methodology: by elucidating how a range of social actors (such as policymakers, state officials, beneficiaries, extension workers and so on) involved in the land and agrarian reform process engage with the ideas and actions of policy institutions, we will be able to document, as Long (2004a: 26 ff.) phrases it, ‘how these ideas are transmitted, contested, reassembled, and negotiated at the points where policy decisions and implementations impinge upon the life circumstances and everyday life-worlds of so-called “lay” or “non-expert” actors’. The title also suggests that policies may hide informal and unofficial objectives that, as Ferguson (1990), De Sardan (2006) and many others suggest, intrude on the formally stated objectives. There is always, as much of the book will indicate, a fair degree of rhetoric at play. What drives the momentum of this book, then, is a commitment to making visible what is happening in the fields and homesteads on the land reform projects and what this potentially means for different actors in different places in South Africa. This is intimately linked to the debate on the land question (Bernstein 2004, 2007; Ntsebeza and Hall 2007; O’Laughlin et al. 2013). With Hammar (2007), I argue that there is a plurality of co-existing land and agrarian questions articulating with one another within specific sites, and across space and time. This in turn urges us to rethink the land question; the book sets out to provide empirical data for that.
The title specifically reflects the three major aims of the book:
•to illuminate the interactions between the role and position of the state and its assumed capacity to design and implement policies;
•to elucidate whether and how the actions derived from these interactions resonate meaningfully with everyday realities. As the book documents, there is a lot more going on at grass-roots level and in the villages than is often assumed by state officials, policymakers and experts;
•to contribute to the debate on land and agrarian reform beyond the South African experiences by unpacking and analysing how policies and everyday practices get intertwined and mutually shape each other.
This analysis identifies a number of important analytical issues for the debate on how to study land and agrarian reform processes and practices.
This chapter briefly reviews some of the major emerging themes within land and agrarian reform processes. It explains the structure of the book and provides an overview of the themes addressed in each chapter. Drawing on these provides substantial scope for both a synthesis of arguments and the formulation of a number of methodological points of departure for further analysis and debate in the study of land reform and agrarian change.
Land and agrarian reform: themes and topics
How to understand and design land reform has generated heated debates between scholars and practitioners. The nub of this book is that land and agrarian reform are both needed in view of the high degree of rural and urban poverty, and the socio-economic and political inequalities that largely, but not exclusively, revolve around ownership of land and access to productive assets and income. It is a matter of undoing past injustices, given the long history of racialised land dispossession and forced removals, as well as the continuing inability of the industrial and service sectors to absorb the abundant rural and urban labour force. These two agendas have increasingly become connected in the policy discourse and everyday practices of land and agrarian reform in South Africa. This is expressed – in varying ways and tones – in government documents (DLA 1996, 1997; DRDLR 2009, 2011), in public statements by African National Congress (ANC) dignitaries and politicians and in publications by South African scholars (for instance, Ntsebeza and Hall 2007; Van Zyl et al. 1996; Walker 2008; Walker et al. 2010); it also finds recognition in the international literature (Bernstein 2002, 2003, 2007; Borras 2008; Lipton 2009; O’Laughlin et al. 2013; Rosset 2006; Thiesenhusen 1989a). What is questioned by this book is what kind of land reform, how implemented and by whom.
Any attempt to lay out some of the major themes and controversies and formulate a methodological framework for the critical analysis of land reform in South Africa must take into account that experiences of land reform are contextual and historically specific. Clearly, these experiences are many and cannot be accounted for fully in this introductory chapter. Nevertheless, I argue that some general lessons can be drawn, which can be broadly summarised as pertaining to the interconnected role of the state and market(s) and the rhythms of agrarian change, as well as the tensions and contradictions that are generated as a result of this. These are as yet unresolved, as we will see, in both theory and everyday practice. Lipton (2009: 8) considers land reform ‘unfinished business’ which should remain a feature of the political agenda. The motivations, however, for addressing land issues have shifted considerably over time.
Thiesenhusen (1989b: 488) succinctly summarises over 50 years of land reform in Latin America: ‘… reform programmes have been too small, too late, too underfunded, too dictated from above, too hierarchically organized, and too infrequently responsive to pressure from the grassroots’. In addition, Thiesenhusen points to a number of processes and key issues that are also relevant for the South African case: (i) ‘if land reform is to be a substitute for rural welfare programmes and affirmative action … it fell short of the mark’ (1989b: 483). (ii) ‘… the technological imperative came partially to replace the social rationale as the predominant force shaping and moulding the defining features of Latin American agrarian structure’ (1989b: 484). He specifically points to labour tenants becoming smallholders and landless labourers: (iii) ‘a group of large- to middle-sized, entrepreneurial, capitalised farms resulted’ (1989b: 484); (iv) a range of reform bottlenecks emerged: inputs supply was constrained; political interest in reforms waned as new economic growth points emerged; bureaucratic procedures, negative and critical public opinion, inadequate post-settlement support and a top-heavy bureaucracy smothered the process and progress; and (v) reform is ‘betting on the strong’: the ‘overall number of peasants accommodated in land reform was relatively small …’ (1989b: 486, 487).
Despite such critical evaluation of land and agrarian reform, it still is a relatively legitimate item on the agenda in many countries and for many donor agencies, and relevant for social movements to engage with. Land reform has been designed, planned and implemented in many different ways and for many different reasons. Two of these modes stand out clearly in the literature and both emerge from relatively contrasting ontologies: the ‘land to the tiller’ perspective, which gradually became incorporated in neo-liberal discourses of development, and those that flow from the ‘agrarian question’ debate.
‘Land to the tiller’ has long been a guiding and popular slogan to legitimise and carry out land reform in Latin America. Redistributing land more equally was to reduce poverty by providing the poor with access to their main productive asset, thereby increasing rural employment and incomes. ‘Land to the tiller’ has also been favoured as a vehicle to increase and render production more efficient as productivity on smallholdings is seen by some as much higher than that on large farms (Lipton 1993, 2009; Mafeje 2003; Wiggins et al. 2010). Securing their land rights would sustain expanded production and increased welfare (Smith 2003) as well as a democratisation of land–society relations (Wittman 2009). Recently, De Janvry and Sadoulet (2010) provided substantial evidence that rural poverty reduction has been associated with growth in agricultural yields and labour productivity; they warn, however, that this relation varies sharply across regional contexts. Land reform, then, should set out simultaneously to provide access to land and to increase production through the increased use of new technologies and integration into commodity markets. This discourse of modernisation, in which market institutions and relations play a key role, is preferred by most land reform protagonists (Deininger and Binswanger 1999; Ellis 1993; Lipton 2009; Lipton and Lipton 1993; Van Zyl et al. 1996). One must hasten to add that a pro-market stance does not automatically mean an uncritical embracing of neo-classical economic growth models. Smith (2003) thoroughly critiques the neo-classical economic assumptions about land markets and people–land relations, which according to many (Ferguson 2013; Hebinck and Van Averbeke 2007; Shackleton et al. 2001) do not revolve only around the production of agricultural goods.
The argument for land reform also has its roots in the classic ‘agrarian question’ debate. Does land reform help to solve the major agrarian questions? What is or will be the direction of agrarian transformation? Smallholders, small- and large-scale farmers, subsistence and market-oriented farmers, peasants and entrepreneurs, capitalist and petty commodity production are some of the social categories and concepts that are used to debate the direction and trajectories of agrarian change. Chayanov (1966) and Kautsky (1988) represent opposing theoretical and ideological positions in the debate about the role of smallholders in the context of capitalist encroachments in agriculture. A Chayanovian tradition has emerged which views smallholders, or rather peasants, as a central factor in rural economic development (Van der Ploeg 2008, 2010, 2013). Kautsky’s entry point is that smallholders are transitionary in the process of capitalist development in the rural agrarian economy; peasants inevitably disappear as a result of ongoing processes of class differentiation, a view which has been adopted by Leninist schools of thought (Bernstein 2009). Bernstein (2007) and also Sender and Johnston (2004) link this with the land reform debate by questioning, for instance, whether land reform alone is able to absorb the unemployed which, in essence, are an outcome of capitalism and industrialisation processes.
Chayanovian views are classified by political economists as a populist tradition that ignores the class character of development (Bernstein 2010a, 2010b), but they continue to play an important role in the land reform debate and future visions of the countryside. This is echoed in the ‘land to the tiller’ slogan. Contemporary social movements, in particular peasant organisations such as Via Campesina and the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), echo in their struggles that family farms and peasant cooperatives are viable options to fight for (Borras 2008; Rosset 2006). However, as Rosset et al. (2006) and Wolford (2010) point out, the smallholder option for land reform has been assimilated by global considerations of equity and production efficiencies and as such incorporated into World Bank neo-liberal land and agricultural discourses. Much of the original land reform discourse has been incorporated into the neo-liberalisation of agrarian policy, which has also gradually encroached on the land reform programme in, for instance, South Africa and Brazil. State-driven development has been replaced by neo-liberalism, which is considered by many as the predominant, global discourse of development (Kydd and Dorward 2001; Gore 2000). For Gore (2000), neo-liberalism involves not only a shift from state-led to market-oriented policies, but also a discursive shift in the ways in which development problems become framed (for example, more market-oriented) and in the types of explanation through which policies are justified. A major consequence of neo-liberalism is that development policy analysis and evaluations by the state and its monitoring institutions revolve around applying a standardised set of methodologies, which tends to disconnect dynamics from context and history, as well as from power relationships. In that sense neo-liberalism emerges as the logical follower of the modernisation discourse of the post–World War II era, with a strong belief in planned development.
Both state and market are subject to critical analysis in the land reform literature and both are also debated in the villages and on land reform farms. Since they often work against development, markets and their role occupy a central place in critical analyses, not least of all in South Africa. Marsden (1998) and Van der Ploeg et al. (2002), for instance, point to the ‘squeeze on agriculture’ that stands for the increased pressure on farm income which is an outcome of unequal terms of trade and power relations between the agricultural sector on the one hand and the industrial and financial sectors on the other. Lipton (2009), who is not against market options per se, is, however, critical of neo-liberalism and the uncritical embracing of the market that follows. Based on a comparative worldwide study, he argues that under certain conditions a degree of market regulation is required to counteract the impact of market and market relations on land reform practices (see also Lipton and Lipton 1993). Land and agrarian reform should address existing unequal power relations between agriculture and industry – a position, given the extent of deregulation, that is not shared by the current South African government, which is wary of any form of state subsidy for the agricultural sector (Hall 2009b).
Binswanger and Deininger (1996), Deininger and Binswanger (1999) and Deininger (1999) are critical of state-led market reform because of political and financial problems with enforcing a ceiling on land ownership. Experiences elsewhere, they argue, show that state-led reforms generate ‘corruption, tenure insecurity, and red tape’ (Deininger and Binswanger1999: 263). They plead instead for a market-led agrarian reform model (MLAR) which has become the much-favoured approach of the World Bank. MLAR involves a negotiated land reform that relies on voluntary land transfers based on negotiations between buyers and sellers (‘willing buyer, willing seller’), where the government’s role is restricted to establishing the necessary framework and making available a land-purchase grant to eligible beneficiaries. MLAR is defined as a land reform strategy fostering a productive and market-oriented agricultural sector. Deininger (1999) argues that becoming a beneficiary of land reform should be self-selective. The role of the state, then, should be limited to providing land-purchase grants and settlement support services, which demands both budget and human resource capacity, both of which appear to be critically lacking in the course of the land reform programme in South Africa.
Borras (2003: 390) in turn questions MLAR and maintains that the MLAR approach to land reform disconnects ‘the technical/administrative issues in project/policy implementation (like post-settlement support, PH) from the political contexts (such as those in South(ern) Africa, PH) within which MLAR operators and clients are embedded’. Neither history and everyday social realties nor technological choices present themselves as neutral. This book documents in detail that neither market nor self-selection of beneficiaries is a neutral process.
To escape neo-liberal tendencies, Huizer (1999), Rosset (2006) and Borras (2008) call for an agrarian reform ‘from below’. Their plea is for a land reform under the leadership of the state but controlled by social movements that have led the social struggle for land and are experienced in devising ways to improve livelihoods. Not the market but people’s livelihoods and their well-being should inform the state’s reform agenda. It is often argued that a precondition for ‘development from below’ is an active social movement capable of mobilising and driving the process and acting as a creative broker. Brazil, where the MST has pushed land reform, is a good example; experiences show, however, that such involvement can also turn out to be ambiguous, where, for example, the leadership of social movements push their own agendas (Caldeira 2008; Wittman 2009).
Cousins (2007, 2011, 2013) argues in the same vein that ‘accumulation from below’ is a more relevant trajectory to pursue in land reform. Applied to the South African context, ‘accumulation from below’ should help to create situations whereby elites cannot run away with the benefits of the reforms. Thiesenhusen (1989b) points at a similar dynamic in Latin America. Moreover Cousins (2007: 240, 241) maintains that ‘what is required is a radical restructuring of agrarian economic space, property regimes and socio-economic relations, premised on the potential for accumulation from below in both agricultural and non-agricultural forms of petty commodity production, and expanded opportunities for “multiple livelihoods strategies” ’. Phrasing it differently, in Chayanovian terminology (Van der Ploeg 2013), land and agrarian reform in south(ern) Africa should facilitate the construction of self-owned and self-controlled resource bases which fit in with multiple livelihood strategies.
Overview of In the Shadow of Policy
The book is divided into three parts. The first, comprising three chapters, provides an analysis of context. The second part consists of ten chapters that examine the gaps between policy and practice, and the final part, with seven chapters, draws on empirical research to critically assess policy-led initiatives in the Eastern Cape. What follows is a brief overview of the chapters in each section.
Part 1 Setting the scene: land and agrarian reform in post-apartheid South Africa
This part provides an analytical context as well as a policy one. Whereas chapter 1 (this chapter) debates land reform and identifies key issues, chapters 2 and 3 specifically address the policy dimensions of land and agrarian reform in South Africa. Key among the arguments in this part is that next to discontinuities in the policy domain, important and strategic continuities in official thinking remain a predominant feature of institutional repertoires and intervention practices.
This chapter reviews the land reform debate in South Africa and elsewhere, and works towards a synthesis of the book. The themes that emerge from the international debate, and analytical lessons learned from agrarian studies more broadly, appear meaningful for understanding the complexities of South Africa’s land reform practices.
In chapter 2, Paul Hebinck reviews agrarian and rural development policies in South Africa and charts the changes and shifts that have taken place over the years. He summarises over 100 years of rural and agricultural development policy and analyses the ideas and ideologies that shaped these policies. They appear to have many common characteristics even though they have emerged from contrasting political ideologies and governance regimes. These continuities often constrain the dramatic structural changes and transformations that post-apartheid policy-makers would like to achieve.
Ben Cousins’s chapter 3 discusses why and how post-apartheid land and agricultural policies have been uncoupled, partly as a result of the unwillingness of policy-makers to tamper with the perceived strengths of large-scale commercial farming, as well as unexamined assumptions about the nature of ‘modern agriculture’. The chapter assesses the consequences of these policy choices, including, most damagingly, the lack of a coherent strategy to reform the inherited agrarian structure.
Part 2 ‘Mind the gap’: discrepancies between policies and practices in South African land reform
The second part explores how agrarian reform policies are transmitted, implemented and experienced at the grass-roots level of projects and villages. Chapters 4–13 draw heavily on empirical investigations of land and agrarian reform practices after land has been redistributed and/or returned to the original owners and new institutional and property relations come into play. The land tenure reform dimension is addressed specifically, to show how history complicates current reform initiatives. The chapters stress that social inequality embedded in relations of class, gender and generation are important ingredients of land reform practices. In addition, there is ample evidence of new forms of inequality that derive from the social categories the reform discourse has introduced. At the same time, beneficiaries make their own selections from among the opportunities and resources land reform policy has to offer, thus unpacking policy components and repackaging them, as it were, to suit the needs of their everyday practices. All of this happens against a background of multiple livelihood strategies.
Francois Marais explores, in chapter 4, the degree to which land reform beneficiaries rework the expert advice provided by land reform consultants. The case material of two farms in the Western Cape shows that beneficiaries are not passive recipients of expert knowledge. They actively redesign knowledge to accommodate their own ideas and experiences. The expert belief that farming should consist solely of cultivation and livestock production is deeply flawed.
In chapter 5, Yves van Leynseele examines the dynamics of project planning in land restitution and explores how land reform beneficiaries contest project viability. An ethnographic study of the different stages of the Makhoba land restitution case provides evidence that land restitution bureaucrats often wish to protect ‘their claimants’ from an unforgiving market. The chapter calls for a critical analysis of the ways in which restitution officials play a brokerage role in the land restitution process, operating as mediators in a field of power in which they occupy an ambivalent position as both local translators of dominant farming models and as engaged bureaucrats. Van Leynseele maintains that state-induced intervention is not implemented by a coherent bureaucracy, nor does it follow a straight road from design through to implementation.
Modise Moseki provides, in chapter 6, an account of everyday life at a land reform farm near Queenstown. Making use of previous studies, his account contrasts starkly with the abstract and quantitative ways in which policymakers and land reform analysts generally evaluate land reform projects. Moseki argues that sweeping policy statements and evaluations based on prescribed outcomes fail to register a lot of what is actually happening on the ground, which hinges on multiple livelihoods. He also points out what the basis is for the new inequalities that have emerged in the South African countryside in the wake of land reform.
Chapter 7, by Harriët Tienstra and Dik Roth, examines cases of market-led land reform in the Western Cape. The cases represent the two dominant forms of land reform in the province: 100 per cent ownership projects and Farmer Worker Equity Share projects. They explore the ongoing dynamics on both kinds of land reform farms from a property rights and relations perspective, and show that when these are transformed on the farms, beneficiaries’ ‘bundles’ of rights and obligations change simultaneously.
Limpho Taoana scrutinises land reform cases in chapter 8 to provide proof that land reform has led to the formation of new social categories in the urban and rural landscapes of South Africa: land reform beneficiaries and non-land reform beneficiaries. These categories are policy-induced categories that only become real in land reform situations. Non-active land reform beneficiaries form a third category, comprised of the disenchanted people that have left a project due to the low performance of the newly acquired farm, or conflict with fellow beneficiaries, or the hard work and exposure to risks involved in participating in a land reform project. Most of them have returned to their previous places of residence.
Malebogo Phetlhu addresses two general but fundamental questions in chapter 9: what is happening on land reform farms, and how do different actors develop strategies to make sense of land reform policies? The chapter provides an everyday life account of the experiences and ideas of those actors who are directly involved with land reform. There is no single answer to the question about how land reform has reshaped people’s lives. Phetlhu builds on the idea that land reform is often a conflictual and ambiguous process, and that it is important to understand that beneficiaries are not a homogeneous group. Indeed, one of the tasks of land and agrarian reform is to deconstruct social categories such as ‘beneficiary’ or ‘extension worker’.
Petunia Khutswane’s chapter 10 concerns the role of youth in land reform. By exploring land reform from a generational point of view, combined with a view of land as a resource, she shows the processes that constrain or inhibit the participation of youth in the South African land reform programme. Little is known about why very few young people engage in land reform projects. The youth dimension of land reform has mainly been associated with mobilisation. The majority of land reform beneficiaries in South Africa are older people whose livelihoods combine land ownership and old age pensions. This raises questions about the future of land reform.
Robert Ross argues in chapter 11 that land restitution is, by definition, about history. Claims to land, and thus to compensation, have to be made on the basis of historical events and not those of a court of law. History, however, has sometimes developed in too complicated a way for the simple assumptions of the Land Claims Commission to be fulfilled. Ross explores the history of land ownership and allocation in the upper Kat River valley in particular, to show the extraordinarily complex nature of land relationships which inform the settlement of restitution claims.
Rosalie Kingwill focuses in chapter 12 on the problems of conjugating customary and common-law notions of ownership. The argument hinges on the complex way in which customary approaches to land ownership articulate with the legal prescripts of ownership in South Africa, the latter derived mainly from common law. Drawing on case material from two Eastern Cape sites, one urban and one rural, she argues that customary practices cannot be reduced to ‘official’ customary law. The chapter charts the lived interpretations of land ownership and identifies how normative practices engage a hybrid of custom and state law, which, for strategic reasons, many scholars, officials and legal practitioners ignore.
In chapter 13, Karin Kleinbooi delivers an account of women’s experiences with exercising their land rights in Namaqualand. She explores the gendered customs and practices surrounding land rights and how women demand, assert or realise their land rights. The chapter shows that women are farming on land allocated for their own use and on land controlled by male relatives, while a few better-off women engage in independent livestock farming. Women gain access to land mainly through relationships of dependency on husbands, fathers and sons. Unmarried and divorced women are extremely vulnerable to loss of land rights and other resources.
Part 3 Competing knowledge regimes in communal area agriculture
Chapters 14–20 in this part draw on empirical research and critically examine the attempts of the state to rejuvenate agriculture and to address food security and well-being in the former homelands of Ciskei and Transkei, now part of the Eastern Cape. The chapters focus on recent policy initiatives such as Siyazondla, the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP) and Siyakhula, as well as the revitalisation of irrigation and the reintroduction of Nguni cattle. These are taken as examples to address the tensions generated by the policy reforms, which attempt to redesign and modernise communal areas and communal farming, and to assess whether and how this resonates with local conditions. Together these chapters show that land reform occurs in contexts where livelihoods are multiple and practices are embedded in complex and dynamic cultural repertoires.
Chapter 14, by Paul Hebinck and Wim van Averbeke, problematises the notion of ‘agrarian’ in the Eastern Cape. Land and agrarian reform and rural development presupposes an agrarian identity from which to tap. This chapter examines the practical and discursive content and meaning of the terms ‘farming’ and ‘agrarian’ in two settlements in the former Ciskei homeland region of the central Eastern Cape. The analysis draws on ongoing research that started in 1995 in two villages in the central Eastern Cape, and more specifically on data collected in 1996/1997 and 2010/2011.
Klara Jacobson and Zamile Madyibi deal in their respective chapters with the intentions and dynamics of the MFPP, designed to revive agriculture in the former Transkei. Jacobson, in chapter 15, identifies that the programme aims to reduce rural poverty through increasing agricultural output and the environmental sustainability of farming. The MFPP aims to transform subsistence-oriented farming into commercially oriented mechanised agriculture using agrochemical inputs, and hybrid and genetically modified maize seeds Conditional grants are provided to financially assist smallholders. The MFPP’s record, Klara Jacobson argues, is meagre and she offers an explanation based on an analysis of how policymakers perceive and understand smallholder or communal agriculture. She unpacks the MFPP discourse by making use of MFPP documents and interviews with policymakers. Case material from three villages provides background data on smallholder agriculture and how the MFPP plan works in practice.
Chapter 16, by Zamile Madyibi, elaborates the MFPP as a planned development intervention which strongly reminds one of the homeland policies. He considers the theoretical assumptions that underpin the MFPP. The chapter explores the multiple realities of the rural Eastern Cape province to show the different ways in which beneficiaries have accommodated the MFPP in their agricultural activities. Three selected cases reflect the different labour patterns and land tenure systems that prevail in the province. The analysis shows the MFPP as rigidly adhering to ideas connected with economies of scale and the pursuit of state-driven green-revolution-style strategies. The MFPP has largely strengthened the trend set in motion in the 1930s, whereby a few elites manage to combine wage income with cultivating more land and obtaining high(er) yields.
Henning de Klerk describes, in chapter 17, the implementation of the Siyazondla Homestead Food Production Programme in Mbhashe. He takes the experiences of women’s groups, who see themselves as prospective participants and beneficiaries, as a starting point to analyse Siyazondla. De Klerk convincingly argues that unfulfilled expectations and experiences of exclusion have a major impact on social relationships among homestead food producers at village level and on the relationships between homestead food producers and local Department of Agriculture (DOA) officials. This needs to be taken into account in debates about governance and development interventions at local municipal level, particularly when these aim at outcomes that are sustainable in the long run.
Derick Fay’s chapter 18 offers another perspective on the dynamics of Siyazondla, by including the Child Support Grant (CSG). Since 1998, CSG has expanded to reach nearly two-thirds of the households in Hobeni, while Siyazondla began to assist households in southern Hobeni in 2007, with production inputs and training. Fay engages in this way with two debates: the potential of direct cash transfers and the potential of subsidised inputs for smallholders to serve as strategies for rural development and poverty alleviation. Fay’s analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork and points at both recent change – a sharp decline in the cultivation of remote fields since 1998 – and long-term continuities – the expansion and intensification of cultivation in homestead gardens. Concurrently, the contribution of formal employment to livelihoods has declined considerably, while the contribution of welfare has expanded.
Chapter 19, by Wim van Averbeke and Jonathan Denison, provides an insightful overview of smallholder irrigation in South Africa, with a particular focus on the Cape provinces, and shows clearly that irrigation cannot be disconnected from years of racial segregation policies. They explore the factors that play a role in the success of smallholder irrigation. These include a range of interventions driven by conflicting objectives, the limited role of agriculture in rural people’s livelihoods, and the legacy of apartheid that continues to cause exclusion from input and output markets. These factors are critical but often ignored.
The last chapter, by Ntombekhaya Faku and Paul Hebinck, explores the tensions and dynamics generated by the reintroduction of Nguni cattle in the Eastern Cape. Nguni projects are meant to address some of the colonial and apartheid legacies and to transform communal area livestock farming. Laudable as this goal might be, a critical examination of the Nguni project reveals that planners fail to take into account the fact that communal farmers’ view of cattle stems from experience and knowledge that has been accumulated over long periods of time. These include the experience of past state efforts to ‘upgrade’ their herds. In contrast to rural realities, projects like the Nguni projects work within a fixed time frame of about eight years and draw their knowledge from a mixture of scientific and idealistic, even romantic, views.
Themes, points of departure and synthesis
The themes and pertinent issues that emerge from the chapters together present a vivid picture of contemporary land reform dynamics experienced in South Africa. These themes can be recapped and synthesised as follows:
•there is a considerable discrepancy between policy discourse and practices;
•next to discontinuities, continuities in official thinking remain a predominant feature of institutional repertoires and intervention practices;
•processes of social differentiation and unequal power relations include relations of class, gender and competing intergenerational interests;
•beneficiaries contest, reassemble and negotiate land and agrarian reform policies;
•multiple and diverse livelihood strategies continue to be important.
These processes and practices are hardly recognised in contemporary land and agrarian reform models. I would argue that what emerges from the experiences documented and analysed in this book is that the state and its support network of experts is unable to engage meaningfully, through its land and agrarian reform policies and programme design, with the action space of people at the local level (for example, in villages and land reform projects) and is equally unable to tackle the inherited structural inequalities in the agricultural sector. In constructing such an argument I will elucidate some key analytical and methodological points of departure for the analysis of land and agrarian reform and agrarian change at the same time as I synthesise the findings of the book at a more abstract, theoretical level. These are multidimensional, overlapping points which I number below in order to facilitate cross-referencing.
1 Policy, processes and practices
Studying the discrepancy between policy and practice requires making a distinction between (land and agrarian) development as a field of policy and development as a practice and a set of processes (Keeley and Scoones 2003; McGee 2004; Van der Ploeg et al. 2012). Land and agrarian development as a practice refers to the many grass-roots level activities, that is, what happens in communal area farming and on land reform farms and projects. Processes refers to the aggregate flows that are constituted by the many development practices; policies denotes the coordinated efforts of the state and its bureaucracy to stimulate, direct, attempt to control, regulate and govern development practices (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007; Scott 1998). State policies are rooted in discourses of development that believe that economic growth, social change and the reduction of poverty can be achieved through the design and implementation of a series of concrete, time-bound development policies and intervention programmes; this is debated in the literature as ‘planned development’ (De Sardan 2006; Long 2001; Long and Van der Ploeg 1989). The leading role of the state in development assumes a coherent bureaucracy; the analyses of the empirical material brought together in this book clearly challenge such Weberian assumptions about state bureaucracies (see also point 3 below).
2 Policy as narrative and the centrality of resources
Policies usually come into being as broadly stated narratives which have the capacity to mobilise the state to act and allocate public resources (Grindle and Thomas 1991; Keeley and Scoones 2003). These narratives are formulated not exclusively by policymakers, bureaucrats and politicians but also by well-situated beneficiaries, corporate interests, organised labour, practitioners, consultants, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), churches, and so on. The outcome and nature of political processes shape which of the narratives make it to an accepted and shared discourse of development that forms the core of state policies.
Policy essentially is about tangible and non-tangible resources (such as land, markets, capital, knowledge, agricultural inputs, sociocultural repertoires, memories, and so on). Policies entail (re)distribution, preventing or smoothing, and privileging access to resources (for example, legal restrictions to ownership and rights, and land redistribution). Policy is also about the power and knowledge to (re)define what constitutes resources: where they originate from (for example, the market), as well as how to deploy and how to redistribute the wealth emanating from their use (Peach and Constatin 1972; Ribot and Peluso 2003). State policies manifest and are transmitted as programmes (such as the social grants and welfare schemes, the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development programme and the Massive Food Production Programme in the Eastern Cape) that define the key resources for development, often in the form of packages and services (Ferguson 1990; Mango and Hebinck 2004), and to make them available to beneficiaries and safeguard their (re)production. Policies are also supported and legitimised by a range of laws which become real as rules and regulations, acts and decrees.
3 Neo-liberalism and the role of the state
Neo-liberalism has thus become an important dimension that shapes the current debate, in South and southern Africa as well as in Brazil. The importance is, as Cousins argues in chapter 3, that neo-liberalism has provided the organising framework for the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and the reforms ensuing from that process. Embracing neo-liberalism is a matter of political choice and orientation – the ANC has embraced neo-liberalism (Habib and Padayachee 2000) – as well as a matter of economic strategy – the deregulation of the agricultural sector which is embedded in the historical position the South African economy occupies in the global economy. But is the impact of neo-liberalism pervasive and determining, or is it only shaping land reform practices, and what ambiguities have transpired? Wolford (2010) examined the outcomes of neo-liberalism for land reform in Brazil: the marriage between the state and MST turned out to be not an easy one, not necessarily pro-poor, and often ended up as privileging the most powerful, thereby reinforcing prior inequalities, a phenomenon also pointed out by Thiesenhusen (1989b). South Africa is a good example of what the obscurities are when development policies are situated in a neo-liberal economic policy context. There is, on the one hand, a considerable reliance on (and belief in) the market and on development ideas, models and technologies that are often, but not exclusively, externally sourced and that do not resonate well with local conditions and experiences. On the other hand, there remains a considerable degree of state influence on reforming the conditions for agricultural production in communal agriculture. The role of the state in beneficiary selection is not left to the market but is also embedded in paternalistic practices. Land reform has certainly retained populist tendencies and low-ranking officials (extension workers and bureaucrats) often try to find options outside the market by bringing beneficiaries under the ambit of the state, or find ways to use land reform brokerage space for themselves (James 2007, 2011; and chapters 6, 8 and 9, this volume).
Whereas the practice in Brazil is that social movements mediate in the selection of beneficiaries (Wolford 2010), South African experiences are rather different. This book provides ample evidence of the dynamics involved in the self-selection approach adopted and implemented by the South African Department of Agriculture (DOA 2001) from the start, and continued by the current Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR). Beneficiaries apply for land reform grants, and since 2001, in the context of policy changes envisaged in the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme, beneficiaries themselves have to contribute, either in kind or in cash. The experiences can be summed up as a combination of beneficiaries pooling their cash and/or in-kind resources (‘renting a crowd’), financial viability criteria to engage with commercial agriculture (Cousins and Scoones 2010), and a continuation of a system of patronage steered by state officials (Wegerif 2004). Chapter 3 reflects critically on the process; chapters 8 and 9 show how self-selection works out at the grass roots. Moreover, the practices of planning and beneficiary selection of the Department of Land Affairs (DLA), the provincial departments of agriculture and the current DRDLR, with regard to reviving and transforming communal agriculture, reveal continuities with their apartheid-era predecessors, the Department of Native Affairs and the Native Agricultural and Lands Branch. The book is ample evidence of continuities as embedded in state institutions’ approaches to planning (see point 7), personnel, relationships and policy languages (see points 4, 5 and 6). This has remained despite the movement of many former NGO staff into the state’s institutions.
4 Gap between discourse and practice
There is a considerable gap between discourse and practice. This can be explained with reference to the nature of the state, or rather governance practices, but it also has much to do with the strong belief that development can be planned through the implementation of policies. The governance dimension is elaborated in the next section. Here we consider planned development policies from the central argument that policies are seldom translated as designed. Policies are not blueprints (Roe 1991) nor do they follow a coherent, linearly implementable script which is laid out by the state and its experts (Hebinck and Shackleton 2011; Long 2004b; Scott 1998). Two processes are important to consider in this respect.
First, projects on paper ‘have little in common with the project itself as it exists in practice, once into the hands of the people to whom it is destined’ (De Sardan 2006: 4). Development interventions inevitably encounter and simultaneously give rise to emerging and robust practices that attempt to redesign or oppose and sometimes blatantly resist them. We observe in South Africa, for instance, that land reform beneficiaries become disenchanted with the land reform process and/or that resource use does not follow the expert-designed business models, often leading to a particular entanglement of practices and new resource use patterns. Chapters 4–10 in the second part of this book show that land reform beneficiaries do not simply sit back and wait for ‘development’ to be delivered to them in the form of post-settlement support; instead they actively redesign post-settlement support by contesting expert-designed business plans. Beneficiaries try to make things work for themselves even though their efforts might be contested by the state and their fellow beneficiaries, often for different reasons. Similar processes are documented in the third part of the book, in chapters 15–20.
Second, policies are frequently (re)negotiated and rewritten by policymakers and are redesigned in the context of consultations and negotiations between the various representatives of state institutions, farmers’ organisations, politicians, political parties, NGOs, bilateral foreign aid donors, World Bank experts, private consultants and agribusiness companies. Nor is there always consensus within and among state institutions and the policy community itself about the future and direction of land and agrarian reform (Cousins 2007; Hall 2004; Lahiff 2007; Van den Brink 2003). Land and agrarian reform are uncoupled, as Cousins argues in chapter 3. The market-led land reform model (MLAR) appears not to be the vehicle to address the fundamental restructuring of the agrarian economy (Lahiff 2007). The decision of the state, for instance, to deregulate and open up agriculture to global markets had a stabilising effect on the agricultural sector, putting pressure on the profitability of farming (the ‘squeeze on agriculture’ alluded to earlier in this chapter) and in turn negatively impacting on the economic success rates of land reform projects and influencing the extent to which farmers comply with new labour legislation and minimum wage rates. We see large landowners paying wages that are set at a low level, and subsequent increases in the rates have not kept up with increases in the prices of food and fuel. ‘The lack of full enforcement,’ as Naidoo (2011: 206) argues, ‘of the minimum wage leads to … little or no gains for low-paid workers that will alleviate poverty … Moreover, full compliance with minimum wages and increases in the rate of pay may well result in dis-employment.’ The strikes for higher wages by farm workers in the De Doorns region in the Wine District Municipality in the Cape is the most recent manifestation of that process, which was predicted by Ewert and Hamman (1999). In addition, the analyses of Van Leynseele and De Klerk in chapters 5 and 17 in particular critique the notion of a development bureaucracy as a coherent institution; state officials in fact act as brokers navigating between various interests and positions (see also James 2011). Taoana, in chapter 8, and Phetlhu, in chapter 9, problematise the brokerage role of extension officers. The implication of these processes is that the state does not act as a monolithic, Weberian institution. Rather, it has multiple layers which act according to their own interpretations of the state’s reform discourse, which often turn out to be contrasting interpretations of state policies, directives and objectives. Next to the state there are many other coordinating mechanisms and practices that shape the dynamics and outcomes of land and agrarian reforms. This helps to explain why policies generate unexpected and perhaps unwanted outcomes in practice.
5 Governance practices
‘The will to’ initiate, to partially quote Li (2007), new forms of governance and citizenship that might be expected to come about in periods of change such as the post-apartheid era in South Africa has not (yet) really come to fruition. Innovative policy processes, as explored by McGee (2004), that would be capable of replacing and transforming colonial and apartheid-era policy-planning mechanisms have not emerged since 1994. Several observers and commentators have criticised (agrarian) policy and its implementation in, for instance, the Eastern Cape. Hadju (2006) points to the still existing unequal power relations between policymakers and local actors, leaving the latter with the feeling that they have limited control over their own fate. The homeland style of governance is reproduced rather than discontinued. Monde (2003) notes that the record of the post-1994 interventions to promote agriculture in the former homelands is long on new initiatives but short on measurable success stories. Both Ainslie (2005) and Kepe (2002) argue that the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture has failed to table a comprehensive and consistent livestock development plan.
It is not just the state and its prostrate institutions, as Scott (1998) labels and understands them, that require critical analysis. Civil society organisations, social movements (such as the Landless People’s Movement; see James 2007 for a critical view on LPM and Greenberg 2004 for a glorifying assessment) and NGOs also appear to be ineffective and incapable of leading the reform ‘from below’ that Rosset (2006) and Borras (2008) call for. The few experiences with mobilisation, such as the land occupations in Mahlahluvani, are not organised into any movement that even NGOs engage with, let alone the state (Wegerif 2010). In addition, as some of the chapters (notably chapters 6, 9 and 16) elucidate, processes through which elites capture development potentials at village or project level colour the outcomes of the reforms.
6 The knowledge base of policy
All actors construct knowledge and they do so in different and contrasting ways. Not all knowledge, but particular bodies of knowledge, however, feed and shape the policy process. Policies are generally informed by knowledge generated by experts and scientists that derive from ill-conceived assumptions about empirical (rural) realities and development that have not been tested in the conditions in which the policies will be applied. Such knowledge results in received wisdoms, which, as Leach and Fairhead (2000) argue, lead to erroneous interpretations of urban and rural change in Africa and also to ‘bad’ or ill-informed policy choices. This helps to explain why most development policies fail to bridge the gap between the perceptions of the experts and the day-to-day experiences of people at grass roots (Keeley and Scoones 2003; McGee 2004; Scoones 1992). Moreover, the national statistics that inform policies are not always reliable, available and up to date (Jerven 2010), and frequently fail to adequately reflect developmental trends at grass-roots level. One of the most influential pieces of ‘received wisdom’ that today shapes land and agrarian reform practices is that agricultural development in communal areas can be realised only by following the ‘commercial’ farming model (Cousins and Scoones 2010; Scoones 1992), which adopts strict notions of what constitutes the agrarian. The latter is brought to the fore in chapters 14, 17, 19 and 20. Scott (1998) describes this phenomenon as ‘seeing like a state’, which reinforces the critical conclusion various chapters draw that the land and agrarian reform policies have not taken into account how land reform beneficiaries – ‘communal farmers’, women, youth and pensioners, understand and enact development. In their response to past and present state interventions, their ability to redesign programme components and their autonomous practices, local actors expose the limitations of policymakers’ assumptions about contemporary rural realities, questioning in turn the capacity of the state to design and deliver services and intervene.
7 Post-settlement support dynamics
What this book substantiates is that post-settlement support has often failed to deliver relevant knowledge and information to the ‘new’ landowners. Post-settlement support advice and project and business plans are often irrelevant to the needs of the beneficiaries (Cousins and Scoones 2010; Hall 2009a; Hebinck et al. 2011). The dissonance between the type of support that is required – assuming that this is voiced in some way – and what is offered can largely be explained by the predominance of a particular paradigm as to what constitutes ‘viable’ farming. This paradigm, as chapter 3 details, is based on the planning models that are associated with large-scale, capital-intensive farming. It also defines agriculture rigidly and narrowly. It assumes, too, that agriculture is rural people’s only livelihood source. Chapters 14, 17 and 18, among others, have shown that this assumption does not reflect rural realities. It is also important to take into account that agriculture in the real world includes more than simply cultivation and livestock. More and more scholars maintain that ‘doing’ agriculture includes harvesting from the natural environment (Hebinck and Lent 2007; Shackleton et al. 2001). Agriculture, they argue, supplements a range of livelihood sources, including wages and, increasingly, state grants. Chapters 4–10 provide accounts of what happens when post-settlement advice does not resonate with local conditions: outsiders blame beneficiaries for the failure of projects. Their style of ‘doing agriculture’ is not recognised or seen by the state as productive. State actors often oppose and misunderstand local development trajectories and ‘accumulation from below’. The prevailing view is that rural people should walk the path of modernisation as defined by Siyakhula and Siyanzondla. The authors of chapters 15, 16, 17 and 18 make this clear in their account of the disenchantment and disappointment that follow when modernisation is forced on people, leading them to withdraw from land-reform-related developments. In addition, some of the chapters also document the way in which bureaucratic procedures hamper the inclusion of a range of potential participants in the reform programmes. De Klerk and Van Leynseele, in particular, draw attention to rigid bureaucratic procedures that exclude people from benefits and meaningful participation. The red tape that attends DOA interventions makes it difficult to execute plans for farm operations in the allocated time frames. These are only two examples of the sort of top-down planning that allows little room for participation and flexibility.
8 The importance of historical continuities
Policies not only ‘have left their historical traces’, as James (2010: 222) argues, which are visible and still felt to this day; they also have many common characteristics even though they have emerged from contrasting political ideologies and governance regimes. This book demonstrates that the overriding reality is that old ideas and institutional repertoires continue to prevail. These often constrain reform programmes from achieving the stated objectives. Both past and present development policies limit local people’s capacity to use the resources made available to them in the ways that they see fit, but as argued earlier, these do not completely prevent local people from manipulating and redesigning land reform interventions. An important continuity that hinders reform from coming to fruition is that, as in the past, policymakers, experts, extension workers and many – but not all – students and scholars of agricultural and rural development link local practices with ‘underdevelopment’.
While there are significant continuities with the past (chapters 2 and 3), post-apartheid policies have also contributed a new set of ideas and institutional practices, as parts 2 and 3 of this book show. For a start, these policies have produced new social categories and terms for them: ‘emergent farmers’; ‘land reform beneficiaries’, which requires a further distinction between those that contribute their own capital, those that contribute in kind to acquire a farm, and ‘collective property associations’. Experience also informs us about non-land reform beneficiaries looking for opportunities, which were previously almost non-existent, to somehow access land. These terms are used alongside the terms for existing social categories, such as ‘commercial’ and ‘subsistence’ farming and ‘small-’ and ‘large-scale’ farmers. It cannot be denied that the state has deployed key resources in its efforts to generate rural transformation. It should be noted, however, that budgets have been very small relative to the scale and complexity of the problem (Aliber and Hall 2012). The state has made new policies and passed land laws and acts. Because of land reform and land restitution people can now acquire land. The controls on the movement of labour have been removed. Post-settlement support is organised and, notwithstanding the critique (Aliber and Hall 2012), it has created opportunities – perhaps only for some well-situated beneficiaries – to engage with markets and access loans, inputs and technology.
9 History and processes of transformation
History as a complicating factor and context runs throughout the book. As Ross argues in chapter 11, land reform in certain areas in the Cape has not resulted in the deracialisation of land ownership because of intricate historical factors. Lahiff (2011) presents a similar argument. Rights to land continue to be vested in the hands of men while their spouses work the land in their absence. This leads Kleinbooi to assert in chapter 13 that women’s rights to land are not being addressed in an appropriate manner. Moreover, as Kingwill shows in chapter 12, when land laws conjugate customary and common-law notions of ownership, the historical complexities of customary claims become even greater. Historical processes of transformation, such as the de-agrarianisation processes referred to by Hebinck and Van Averbeke (chapter 14) and Fay (chapter 18), complicate the current attempts of the state to resuscitate agriculture. Although there are considerable local differences, it is appropriate to refer to the majority of rural African people as rural dwellers or villagers, and not as peasants, smallholders, communal farmers or farmers sensu strictu. We are often dealing with what F. Wilson (1975) characterises as an ‘industrial proletariat domiciled in the country’, and what Beinart (2001) refers to as a ‘pensionariat’. Along with retrenched workers and urban drifters, pensioners make up the largest proportion of people in many villages; this varies sharply, however, across regional contexts.
10 Social heterogeneities
It would be a mistake to treat land reform and rural development processes homogeneously and the beneficiaries as an undifferentiated group of social actors. Several chapters, notably those by Marais, Moseki, Taoana, Phetlhu and Khutswane, provide detailed accounts of how existing social inequalities (based, for example, on the ownership of resources such as livestock, capital and contacts, but also on gender and age) among groups of beneficiaries shape land reform dynamics and outcomes. Post-apartheid forms of inequality are strengthened by the politics of land reform, especially since the state distinguishes between beneficiaries and/or non-beneficiaries. The much alluded-to intrinsic problems of the collective property associations (James 2007) and the ‘rent-a-crowd strategies’ (Lahiff 2007) of some of the beneficiaries, aimed at expanding and strengthening their control over assets, undermine the ability of people to devise commonly shared strategies and result in struggles and disenchantment, and winners and losers. Existing inequalities, based on assets and skills, are strengthened. At the same time collective property organisations and the rent-a-crowd strategies that have given shape to land and agrarian reform in South Africa were imposed by the state and state officials to achieve results and to show the public that land reform proceeds as planned. The social forms and strategies also emerged to achieve, with the limited state grants that have become available, scales of operation that would fit with their idea of commercial agriculture.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided a summary as well as a synthesis of the book against the background of some of the major theoretical and empirical lessons land and agrarian reform processes have generated in South Africa as well as elsewhere in the world. Land and agrarian reform does not unfold as a neat and straightforward process; societies in which reform is launched and bureaucracies and states that give hands and feet to these processes appear far more complex than is often assumed or dreamed of. The lessons learned from land reform are synthesised in a series of conceptual starting points; these help us to disentangle the complexities, ambiguities and contradictory realities and experiences that land and agrarian reform has generated and will continue to generate.
In the Shadow of Policy conveys many ideas and suggestions. By making a distinction between policies and (everyday) practices, it offers scope to study the discrepancy between theory and policy (that is, design and implementation, including budgeting) and practice (what is implemented, how and by whom, and how reworked by beneficiaries). It reflects on the politics of land and agrarian reform and challenges those involved to ensure a genuine role for reforms on the political agendas of governments and international development agencies. What is questioned is whether these agendas take note of the realities at grass-roots level and whether an organised social movement is there to channel land reform processes. In the Shadow of Policy simultaneously critically engages with the assumptions that the South African state has the capacity to provide budgets, to design meaningful programmes and to deliver services to beneficiaries. The experiences of reform that are elucidated in this book severely critique that capacity. Yet the idea that beneficiaries sit back and wait for government to deliver, and do not enact development, is not in line with the findings from empirical research in South Africa’s rural areas. At the same time, land reform experiences are varied and heterogeneous, from both a social and a livelihood point of view. But beneficiaries do not become disenchanted only with the process; elites ‘capturing’ benefits for themselves, internal fights, abuse and new forms of social inequalities signify that beneficiaries contest the socio-political spaces of land reform.
This chapter has provided food for thought about land reform policy and practices and has captured land and agrarian reform policies, practices and processes as messy and often as unordered. When we begin to view land reform as messy and structurally unordered, new modes of thinking, new designs and social action are required. In the Shadow of Policy provides some ideas to facilitate progress beyond rhetoric.
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