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
