post-apartheid agrarian policy and to shape the domain of the applied agrarian sciences.
Another common element in agrarian and rural development policies is the consistently held premise that modern technologies, markets and related institutions represent the only relevant and productive path for development. This is manifested in the noted ideological shift from a human rights perspective to productionism and rationalism. This, in turn, can be explained by the influence on key policymakers of the commercial farming lobby and economists advocating a conventional linear model of agricultural development uplifting the emergent farmers from subsistence to commercial producers. Most policies are derived from what might be called ‘received wisdoms’ (Leach and Fairhead 2000) commonly based on untested assumptions about empirical reality. It is important, therefore, to question the nature of the knowledge that informs current agrarian reform and rural development policies, as well as the quality and quantity of service delivery and the slow pace of land restitution and redistribution.
A significant issue is that the productivist discourse that underlies these does not take sufficiently into account that the state’s social policies have been by far the most significant factor in (rural) development and that the role of agriculture, as narrowly defined by experts, has diminished dramatically. What this means for revitalising agriculture under the banner of the current CRDP is a critical question.
The trend that has emerged over the years is that more than ever, state and expert notions sanction projects or elements of projects both before and after a project has been established or a programme has been launched. Land reform increasingly is couched in terms of the conventional transfer of knowledge, manifested in the advice from expert-consultants, mentorship programmes and transformed institutional arrangements, as providing access to markets. Land reform, as Ben Cousins argues in chapter 3, is not meaningfully engaging with agrarian reform. After all these years, land and agrarian reforms are still at the crossroads.
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