Land Reform in Southern Africa: Myths, Visions and the Harsh Realities of Development and Justice (original) (raw)

2011, Development and Change

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