Land Reform in South Africa: An Uneven Transformation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Land and resource reform in South Africa: multiple realities, contradictions and paradigm shifts
Chapter in: Hebinck, P. and C. Shackleton (eds.) Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa: Impact on Livelihoods. London: Routledge, 2011
This book is built on the premise that land reform remains a powerful political imperative in societies where there have been extreme inequalities in land and resource ownership, access and use. Reforming land and the broader agrarian structure have been seen as key ingredients of policies of social and economic transformation and, depending on the model, of environmental transformation as well. Countries and states that have followed a prescribed reform trajectory can always count on support from donor and bilateral agencies like the World Bank, UNDP and FAO. South Africa fits this profile. Under the political leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), reforms have been initiated to transform society and make it more equitable. Political choices, which include the construction of a legal and knowledge infrastructure, have been made that will facilitate this transformation. The infamous Land Act of 1913 has been repealed. Communities, groups and individuals who were forcefully removed from their ancestral land have been able to reclaim it. Land bought on a willing-seller willing-buyer basis has been redistributed. More recently, post-settlement support has been provided to land reform beneficiaries. This has meant, in effect, that beneficiaries have been forced to accept the advice and direction of a variety of experts: policymakers, extension agents and consultants. It is assumed that the recipients of post-settlement support are a relatively homogenous group, even though they comprise rural dwellers, township dwellers, farm workers, labour migrants, ‘subsistence’ farmers, and men and women. Expectations have run high, but have frequently been disappointed. This book brings together a set of insightful analyses based on critical examination of the South African experience of the last 15 years with regard to the complexities that have emerged in relation to the implementation of land and related reforms.
Radical Land Reform in South Africa – a Comparative Perspective?
Journal for Contemporary History, 2017
A great deal of political rhetoric has been uttered regarding radical economic transformation that includes calls for more radical land reform proposals. This rhetoric is the source of political mobilisation in both the governing African National Congress (ANC), as well as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) opposition. While the ANC call for the end of the willing buyer, willing seller principle in land reform policies and legislation in line with their National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the EFF support a more extreme expropriation without compensation approach. Both these approaches can be regarded as forms of radical land reform that are grounded in their specific ideological orientations. Since no academic definition exists regarding the concept "radical land reform", it is necessary that this is conceptualised. In order to analyse the possible implications of radical land reform, this article explores the outcomes of similar approaches in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Zimbabwe. The lessons of this comparative analysis indicate that land reform requires a balance between existing land rights and food security on the one hand, and the urgency for historical redress and redistribution on the other.
Land Reform in Southern Africa: Myths, Visions and the Harsh Realities of Development and Justice
Development and Change, 2011
Land reform in Southern Africa is a subject of heated debate. The former settler colonies in the region-Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwehave inherited racially skewed patterns of land distribution, and each has had to find ways to address their history of dispossession and the undermining of peasant production. Much has been written about these histories and the demands for land reform to redress these legacies (see e.g. Palmer, 1990; Terreblanche, 2002). Whether and how such land reforms should take place, however, has always been a moot point. The World Bank changed its position on land reforms several times (Deiniger and Binswager, 1999), but at the time of the democratic transition in South Africa, the Bank's policy makers supported land reform, provided it was implemented through a market-led approach. They conceded that the (financial) support the white-dominated large-scale commercial agricultural sector received from the apartheid regime might have had perverse effects on the productivity and efficiency of the sector, and that transferring land from this sector to small-scale farmers could improve agricultural production and contribute to poverty alleviation (Deiniger and May, 2000). Market-led land reform, its proponents argued, would be demand driven rather than supply driven, prevent the expropriation of productive farms, or the allocation of land to those considered to be less productive farmers. Yet, the potential of market-led land reform to contribute to both economic development and
A political economy of land reform in South Africa
Review of African Political Economy, 2004
Land reform is one way in which the 'new' South Africa set out to redress the injustices of apartheid and, by redistributing land to black South Africans, to transform the structural basis of racial inequality. During the first decade of democracy, land reform has fallen far short of both public expectations and official targets. This article describes the progress of the programme and its changing nature. It is argued that a recent shift in land policy, from a focus on the rural poor to 'emerging' black commercial farmers, is consistent with changes in macro-economic policy and reflects shifting class alliances. The programme now appears to pursue a limited deracialisation of the commercial farming areas rather than a process of agrarian restructuring. Most fundamentally, land reform has not yet provided a strategy to overcome agrarian dualism.
Land and Agrarian reform in South Africa: Caught by continuities
Land, memory, reconstruction and justice: Perspectives on land restitution in South Africa, 2006
Land reform is often implemented with a view to breaking with the past, particularly by transforming uneven distribution of land. Land reform in South Africa began with a similar agenda and was launched and implemented even before Apartheid was dissolved and the new ANC-led government took control. This paper examines the claim that land reform is a discontinuity by exploring a counterclaim that contemporary land reform policy and practices represent continuities. Through examining past and present conflicts between the state and peasantry in South Africa, and the institutions and social actors that bridge this divide, the paper argues that the cores of such conflicts are knowledge contestations, particularly between the state’s bureaucrats, the experts they hire and local people. Continuities in other words are embedded in practices of state institutions with regard to planning, personnel, relationships and policy languages.
2020
The reality of capitalist economy, its inherent dynamics and contradictions, must be understood as central to policy debates about land reform in South Africa today. Progressive land reform should strive to promote ‘accumulation’ from below’, through the redistribution of productive land to a large number of petty agricultural commodity producers. Supporting the social reproduction needs of the rural poor is also important, and securing their rights to communal land must be a key goal of tenure reform. Beyond South Africa, the experience of redistributive land reform more broadly suggests that southern Africa is a unique context in some ways (e.g. there is a need to break up large and productive farms) but not in many others. Many of the problems facing land reform in South Africa have been experienced elsewhere. Beyond land reform, the world is currently in the grip of several overlapping crises, notably the increasing precarity of working populations, ecological breakdown, large-s...
South African land reform strategy : a panacea for unlocking developmental debacles
2019
The purpose of this paper is efficaciously to evaluate if land reform remains a pertinent a strategy for unlocking development in South African socio-economic realm. Pragmatically access to land habitually perpetuate and lead to explicit advancement for unlocking development in spheres of socio-economic conditions. The latter is lamented by the disillusioning acts of confiscation of South African land without remuneration. The South African land reform remains a lip-serviced subject of contention, notwithstanding the unsurpassed strides undertaken by the contemporary government regime through its wider legs of restitution, tenure reform and redistribution. Moreover, the wider legs of reform were explicitly found to serve as rudimentary within which progress towards unlocking developmental debacles can be measured. The paper is purely theoretical, it's a desktop study which relied heavily on the literature review to underpinned the argument. The paper takes cognizance of section ...