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3
Land reform and agriculture
uncoupled: the political economy
of rural reform in post-apartheid
South Africa
Ben Cousins
Restructuring of the rural economy has been somewhat on the margins of political and policy debate in post-apartheid South Africa, but recently this has begun to change. A wide-ranging resolution adopted by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) at its watershed Polokwane conference in 2007 asserted the vital importance of land and agrarian reform for the reduction of rural poverty. Land reform and rural development were identified as priorities by the Zuma government after the 2009 election.
This chapter traces the evolution of post-apartheid policies on land and agrarian reform in South Africa, with a particular focus on land redistribution and agricultural production. It examines the influence of different interest groups on emerging policies, and assesses the impact of these policies to date. The chapter argues that the fundamental flaw in post-apartheid rural reform policies has been the failure to couple land and agricultural reform in a coherent and effective manner, with the latter hamstrung by policymakers’ uncritical acceptance of the superiority of large-scale commercial farming and scepticism about the ‘commercial viability’ of small-scale systems of production. The state has thus attempted to implement land reform without engaging in meaningful agrarian reform, thus severely constraining its impact on rural poverty and inequality.
Policy processes in the transition to democracy
The period of multiparty negotiations between 1990 and 1994 saw a number of shifts taking place in the South African political landscape which influenced the stances of different political groupings in relation to land and agriculture. The ANC had not seen rural areas as a priority for many years (Dolny 2001: 33; Levin and Weiner 1996: 97–98, 107), and in 1990 the party brought few concrete proposals for rural reform to the negotiating table. The Freedom Charter of 1955 had stated that ‘the land shall be shared by those who work it. Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided among those who work it, to banish famine and land hunger. The state shall help the peasants with implements, seeds, tractors and dams’ (ANC 1955). Although imprecise, the Charter clearly envisioned radical transformations in both the nature of property land rights and their distribution, perhaps even implying nationalisation of land. In the early 1990s, as multiparty negotiations began, nationalisation was still seen as a possibility by some activists (Dolny 2001: 50), but by 1993 it was clearly off the agenda of the ANC. Under discussion, rather, was the wording of a property clause that would protect existing property rights, but at the same time allow for land reform (Levin and Weiner 1996: 108).
Hall (2011) describes the convoluted and contested process of formulating policy stances on land and agriculture in the early 1990s. Agricultural policy and economic rationales for land reform were domains captured by the World Bank, other foreign advisors, and a grouping of South African agricultural economists based largely at the Development Bank of Southern Africa and at the University of Pretoria, who positioned themselves as politically neutral experts with local knowledge. The World Bank and other foreign agricultural economists favoured redistribution to small-scale farmers, citing the inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and productivity, but their arguments were met with scepticism by many of the South African economists (Hall 2011: 172). According to Hall, a middle ground emerged, a vision of a ‘mix of farm sizes, which could offer opportunities for entry by the poor while taking advantage of the economies of scale where they did exist, and making possible mutual support and equipment sharing between white and black, large and small farmers’ (Hall 2011: 172–173). There was also agreement amongst the economists on the need for further deregulation and liberalisation of the agricultural sector.
The World Bank also strongly promoted its favoured model of ‘market-assisted’ land reform, in which grants would be provided by the state for applicants to purchase land on the open market, with ‘willing buyers’ negotiating prices with ‘willing sellers’. At a Land Policy Options conference in 1993, convened jointly by the ANC-aligned Land and Agriculture Policy Centre (LAPC) and the World Bank, this was effectively the only model on the table. A target of transferring 30 per cent of commercial farmland from whites to blacks in five years was proposed, and later accepted as policy. Hall (2011: 186) argues that by 1994
… the policy discourse was internally contradictory, an amalgam of competing visions. It embraced efficiency and equity, the state and market, ‘the poor’ and ‘emerging farmers’, women and men, agricultural and non-agricultural land uses, commercial and non-commercial production, allowing the remaining fundamental differences to be elided.
The negotiated settlement decisively altered the framework of debate on land reform. In particular, it saw an accommodation of the interests of large-scale commercial farming interests, through acceptance of a ‘willing seller, willing buyer’, ‘market-assisted’ approach to land acquisition and redistribution. The dominant discourse of the time was ‘feasibility’, referring not only to how coherent, practical and affordable policy proposals were, but also how realistic in political terms, given the negotiated (and compromised) character of the political transition (Cousins 2004). Tellingly, an anodyne notion of ‘rural development’ was what land reform would contribute to, rather than a thorough going agrarian reform aimed at addressing structural inequality (Wildschut and Hulbert 1998).
Land redistribution and agricultural policies and their implementation, 1994–1999
The 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy set out the rationale for land reform, and outlined how it would seek to achieve its ambitious goals: addressing the injustices of dispossession in the past; creating a more equitable distribution of land ownership; reducing poverty and contributing to economic growth; providing security of tenure for all; and establishing a sound system of land management. Its vision was of ‘a land reform which results in a rural landscape consisting of small, medium and large farms; one which promotes both equity and efficiency through a combined agrarian and industrial strategy in which land reform is a spark to the engine of growth’ (DLA 1997: 7).
Land
