What is a ’smallholder’? or Who should be the primary target of redistributive land reform?
Who should be the primary beneficiaries of redistributive land reform in South Africa, and how will land redistribution contribute to the reduction of rural poverty? Fifteen years after the transition to democracy, these remain controversial and contested questions. At least at the level of rhetoric, the primary beneficiaries of land reform are once again, as in 1994/95, being identified as the rural poor and small-scale farmers, or smallholders, rather than emerging commercial farmers. But what exactly is a ‘smallholder’?
I see the term as problematic. It tends to obscure inequalities and significant class-based differences within the large population of households engaged in agricultural production on a relatively small scale. Much usage suggests that smallholders form a relatively homogeneous group. This fails to distinguish between producers for whom:
- farming constitutes only a partial contribution to the income needed to maintain themselves at their current standard of living, while also providing for their children’s future (i.e. what is termed their ‘social reproduction’)
- farming meets most of their social reproduction requirements
- farming produces a significant surplus over and above their reproduction needs, allowing profits to be reinvested and, for some, capital accumulation in agriculture to begin (i.e. what is termed ‘expanded reproduction’).
The term ‘smallholder’ tends to foreclose on analysis of the causal processes through which inequalities emerge within populations of small farmers, and draws attention away from internal tensions within households (often gender-based) over the use of land, labour and capital. It can also misdirect the formulation of land and agrarian reform policies aimed at addressing structural inequality.
Sheep farmer (Source: Edward Ruiz/iAfrika Photos)
I argue in a recent PLAAS Working Paper that a class-analytic perspective on small-scale farming is essential for understanding the differentiated character and diverse trajectories of small-scale agriculture within capitalism. The key concepts in this perspective are that of ‘petty commodity production’ and ‘accumulation from below’. I propose that land and agrarian reform should aim to support a broadly-based process of accumulation from below, in which successful small-scale farmers begin to supply domestic (and some export) markets for food. This should be combined with supporting supplementary food production on small plots and fields by large numbers of rural (and peri-urban) households in order to enhance their food security and reduce income poverty.
I propose the following typology for different kinds of small-scale agricultural producers (see Table 1). The key variables in this typology are the degree to which agriculture contributes to social reproduction or expanded reproduction, and the degree to which hired labour is used in the agricultural production process. These are the key indicators of class relations in agriculture.
Table 1. Proposed class-analytic typology of small-scale agricultural producers in South Africa
| Class category | Criteria |
| Supplementary food producers, | Work small plots or gardens, do not have access to wage income, and rely on additional forms of income such as a social grant, craftwork or petty trading for their simple reproduction |
| Allotment holding wage workers | Work small plots or gardens but are primarily dependent on wages for their simple reproduction |
| Worker-peasants | Farm on a substantial scale but are also engaged in wage labour, and combine these in their simple reproduction |
| Petty commodity producers | Are able to reproduce themselves from farming alone (or with only minor additional forms of income) |
| Small-scale capitalist farmers | Rely substantially on hired labour and can begin to engage in expanded reproduction and capital accumulation |
| Capitalists whose main income is not from farming | Farm on a small-scale but their main source of income is another business. |
In a class-analytic perspective, BEE-type land reform, which government policies focused strongly on during the Mbeki era, can be seen as a peculiar form of ‘accumulation from above’. Here a highly inegalitarian agrarian structure is left largely intact, and only the racial identity of large scale capitalist farmers alters. Accumulation ‘from below’, in contrast, implies that the inherited agrarian structure is radically reconfigured so that much larger numbers of people begin to participate in the agricultural sector and benefit substantially from such participation. However, it also suggests that ultimately these new producers must be able to produce as much as (if not more than) large scale commercial farmers, replacing them in supplying local, national and international markets. Beyond the household food security of small-scale producers and the rural poor is the critical issue of how agriculture can contribute to the economic development of society as a whole, support a growing urban population, and help reduce structural unemployment.
It seems to me that only some small-scale, family-based farmers are ever likely to meet this productivity challenge, in part because high potential land is so scarce in South Africa. In addition, inequalities in land access, livestock holdings and sources of finance within rural populations suggest that class differentiation already exists to some degree. And successful petty commodity producers and wealthier worker-peasants will be better placed to benefit from agrarian reform interventions than those for whom food production is only a minor supplement to their livelihoods.
Successful accumulation from below, then, would involve a class of productive small-scale capitalist farmers emerging from within a larger population of petty commodity producers, worker-peasants, allotment-holding wage workers and supplementary food producers. All these categories are legitimate beneficiaries of land and agrarian reform policies aimed at poverty reduction. But only those able to fully utilize the productive potential of the scarce land and water resources of the country, and engage in significant on-farm investment, are likely to be able to replace those productive large-scale commercial farmers whose land is acquired though land reform, and compete effectively with those that remain. ‘Accumulators from below’ are potentially a much larger group than existing large-scale farmers, perhaps four to five times as large, but even so they would clearly constitute a minority of the rural population as a whole.
One concrete example might be a large-scale horticultural support programme aimed at increasing the output of fresh garden produce, for household use, sale on local markets, sale to small town supermarkets, and to sale to niche markets in larger town and cities. Key components of such a programme could include the promotion of water harvesting and small-scale irrigation schemes, subsidized fencing and irrigation infrastructure, improved access to inputs, training and extension support, the establishment of a fresh produce market information agency, and co-operative marketing to niche markets. All the class categories in my suggested typology could benefit from such a programme to a degree.
Land and agrarian reform also involves difficult trade-offs, however, which should be openly acknowledged and confronted. These arise from the fact that productive land, irrigation water, and government funds and capacities are all in scarce supply in South Africa. Only about 10% of land in South Africa is potentially arable, and of that only around 11 % of this has irrigation potential. The generally limited agricultural potential of land in South Africa means that hard choices have to be made about who should benefit from the redistribution of high potential land and irrigation water. Given their potential to be efficient users of such resources, small-scale (black) capitalist farmers, as well as the more successful petty commodity producers and worker-peasants (rather than those supplementing their food supply) are the most likely candidates.
This argument is likely to be politically contentious. Does it constitute an abandonment of the rural poor? I don’t think so. The Working Paper outlines the policy options that could see the rural poor benefiting in significant ways from land and agrarian reform, without the illusion that these will be sufficient to eliminate rural poverty. My key argument is that processes of rural differentiation need to be taken seriously, and should result in differentiated policies.
Source: PLAAS
In August 2009 Ben Cousins was awarded an NRF research Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. This generous grant enables Cousins to lead an ambitious and highly relevant research programme in the next 5 to 15 years that will produce fresh knowledge, analysis and discussion that will hopefully contribute to the shaping of new paradigms.
The Research Chair will mount a five year research programme on agrarian change, land reform and poverty reduction, and explore the policy implications of its research findings. The design of the programme is framed by two over-arching questions:
(i) what processes of socio-economic change are under way in the South African countryside that are likely to influence the outcomes and impacts of land and agrarian reform?
(ii) what are the impacts of land and agrarian reform policies and programmes on agricultural productivity, agrarian structure and rural poverty?
A key underlying premise of the proposed research programme is that interventions such as land reform occur within poorly understood social, economic and political contexts, the realities of which deeply influence the outcomes. Yet interventions are often based on simplistic understandings of social reality, on static models of social organization, and on problematic assumptions. When the assumptions and understandings that inform policy and implementation are at odds with reality, outcomes are unlikely to be the same as the desired objectives. Conversely, if appropriate understandings of complex realities can directly inform policy making and implementation, these are more likely to be effective.
The acceptance of his Research Chair has meant that Cousins decided to step down as Director as PLAAS. However, he will continue to be based at PLAAS, and students who work within the context of the research programme will be registered at PLAAS and the University of the Western Cape. The programme is anticipated to begin in January 2010.
For the full text of the invitation for applications to complete a Masters, Doctoral and Post-Doctoral degree within the context of this programme click here. The closing date for applications is 15 December 2009.
Source: PLAAS 2005
Wednesday’s Business Day reported that South Africa’s Land Claims Commission has overcommitted its funds with R10-billion to supply post-settlement support to restitution beneficiaries and pay for land it has purchased from landowners.
According to the report Treasury has turned down the commission’s request for an additional R10,3-billion for restitution over the next three years. A revised proposal for R3,1-billion is on the table.
Anonymous government officials are reported to have “warned of a ticking time bomb waiting to explode”.
"Victory is our Target" Target Comics book cover: Vol 4, No. 7
I’m aware that some readers found my earlier posting regarding the re-scheduling of the 30% target too obscure. This seems to have been especially the case regarding what I meant by there being ‘no real budget constraint’ on land reform. I would like to sketch my argument a little more carefully and clearly. (For my own benefit as well.)
In a given year, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) has a fixed budget for land reform purposes which it must not exceed. So in the short-term, of course there is a budget constraint. Because of this, DRDLR officials often complain about the fact that rising farmland prices have eroded the purchasing power of its land reform budget. And of course, this is true. Average farmland prices rose by about a factor of 3 between 2001 and 2008. This is hurting.
However, it’s also true that over this same period, capital spending on land reform rose almost ten-fold, from R560 million to R5.3 billion. What does this huge increase reflect? It seems to reflect two things. First, it reflects the acceleration of restitution settlements, which National Treasury had no choice but to try to accommodate. And second (and somewhat later in time), redistribution budget rose dramatically, largely reflecting the increased ability to spend money through ever larger grants (which as I argued previously, has had very modest positive impact).
And yet, expenditure on land reform – even including current (i.e. non-capital) spending – has never reached a full 1% of the total national and provincial consolidated government expenditure. In 2001/02, land reform expenditure was only 0.27% of consolidated government spending; by 2007/08 this share had increased to 0.92%, and since then it has declined somewhat. Why so little for such an important programme? Because there are many other important programmes, and land reform just has not demonstrated that it’s a particularly good way of spending scarce resources.
I would interpret the increases in the budget for redistribution in particular as being more of an indulgence on the part of Treasury than an affirmation of its worth. (Never mind the DRDLR’s new rural development programme; Treasury officials privately shake their heads when you just mention it.) This indulgence has been made possible in large measure by the programme’s initial small size, as well as by the fact that government spending overall has risen so much (between 1999/00 and 2009/10, there was a 91% increase in consolidated expenditure, after adjusting for inflation – so much for fiscal austerity!). But note that the current budget for ‘social protection’ (largely consisting of social grants) is 22 times as great as that for land reform. For health and education, the figures are 16 and 26 times, respectively. It’s not as though the government is shy about spending money to benefit low-income households. (Perhaps less understandably, the budget for ‘recreation and culture’ is 38% greater than the land reform budget.)
Before I completely lose sight of what point it is I want to make, it is this. While DRDLR’s sense of not having enough money is understandable, the reality is that there is enormous scope for their budget to increase, if and when they can demonstrate ‘success’. What ‘success’ means should not be taken simplistically to mean agricultural productivity or enterprise profits, but the absence of success right now is obvious, and both the Director General and the Chief Land Claims Commissioner have candidly and courageously shared their concerns about the ‘challenges’ experienced. All of this is to say that we need to focus our efforts on improving land reform, rather than achieving some arbitrary hectarage target. The hectares will follow.
I’m aware that some readers found my earlier posting regarding the re-scheduling of the 30% target too obscure. This seems to have been especially the case regarding what I meant by there being ‘no real budget constraint’ on land reform. I would like to sketch my argument a little more carefully and clearly. (For my own benefit as well.)
In a given year, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) has a fixed budget for land reform purposes which it must not exceed. So in the short-term, of course there is a budget constraint. Because of this, DRDLR officials often complain about the fact that rising farmland prices have eroded the purchasing power of its land reform budget. And of course, this is true. Average farmland prices rose by about a factor of 3 between 2001 and 2008. This is hurting.
However, it’s also true that over this same period, capital spending on land reform rose almost ten-fold, from R560 million to R5.3 billion. What does this huge increase reflect? It seems to reflect two things. First, it reflects the acceleration of restitution settlements, which National Treasury had no choice but to try to accommodate. And second (and somewhat later in time), redistribution budget rose dramatically, largely reflecting the increased ability to spend money through ever larger grants (which as I argued previously, has had very modest positive impact).
And yet, expenditure on land reform – even including current (i.e. non-capital) spending – has never reached a full 1% of the total national and provincial consolidated government expenditure. In 2001/02, land reform expenditure was only 0.27% of consolidated government spending; by 2007/08 this share had increased to 0.92%, and since then it has declined somewhat. Why so little for such an important programme? Because there are many other important programmes, and land reform just has not demonstrated that it’s a particularly good way of spending scarce resources.
I would interpret the increases in the budget for redistribution in particular as being more of an indulgence on the part of Treasury than an affirmation of its worth. (Never mind the DRDLR’s new rural development programme; Treasury officials privately shake their heads when you just mention it.) This indulgence has been made possible in large measure by the programme’s initial small size, as well as by the fact that government spending overall has risen so much (between 1999/00 and 2009/10, there was a 91% increase in consolidated expenditure, after adjusting for inflation – so much for fiscal austerity!). But note that the current budget for ‘social protection’ (largely consisting of social grants) is 22 times as great as that for land reform. For health and education, the figures are 16 and 26 times, respectively. It’s not as though the government is shy about spending money to benefit low-income households. (Perhaps less understandably, the budget for ‘recreation and culture’ is 38% greater than the land reform budget.)
Before I completely lose sight of what point it is I want to make, it is this. While DRDLR’s sense of not having enough money is understandable, the reality is that there is enormous scope for their budget to increase, if and when they can demonstrate ‘success’. What ‘success’ means should not be taken simplistically to mean agricultural productivity or enterprise profits, but the absence of success right now is obvious, and both the Director General and the Chief Land Claims Commissioner have candidly and courageously shared their concerns about the ‘challenges’ experienced. All of this is to say that we need to focus our efforts on improving land reform, rather than achieving some arbitrary hectarage target. The hectares will follow.
Key provisions of the Communal Land Rights Act are declared unconstitutional. Where to now?
In March 2006 four rural communities challenged the constitutionality of the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004, arguing that it would undermine their right to tenure security as set out in the South African constitution. On the 30th October 2009 Judge AP Ledwaba of the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria handed down judgment (see box in right pane) in the CLRA legal challenge. The judge declared that 15 key provisions of the Act, and in particular those providing for the transfer and registration of communal land, the determination of rights by the Minister and the establishment and composition of land administration committees, are invalid and unconstitutional. This renders the Act impossible to implement in its present form, and effectively means that if the Constitutional Court confirms the judgement, government will have to fundamentally rethink its approach to the reform of communal tenure.
The judge did not find that that the parliamentary process followed in passing the law was flawed, or that the Act in effect creates a fourth tier of government, as argued by the applicants. He did not strike down the Act as a whole. The judgement is focused on key arguments around security of tenure, and in particular on the problems that the Act could create for smaller or independent communities, such as the Makuleke community (one of the four applicants,) which are located within the jurisdictional boundaries of large Traditional Councils. The judge accepted arguments that land rights and land administration in tenure systems derived from customary norms and principles are nested or ‘layered ‘ in character, and that it is therefore problematic to vest centralised control over land in overarching Traditional Councils.
After fifteen years of debate, law making and legal action, post-apartheid South Africa is no nearer to addressing the key issue of the uncertain legal status of the land rights of millions of people living under communal tenure , mostly in the former reserves. At the same time, the other components of government’s tenure reform programme, such as those aimed at securing the tenure security of farm workers, dwellers and labour tenants, as well as of the beneficiaries of land restitution and redistribution, are also in trouble. Land owners who wish to evict farm dwellers or labour tenants have found ways to use tenure reform laws to their own advantage. Government support to these vulnerable groups has proved ineffective to date. Farm evictions continue apace. On farms transferred to beneficiaries of land reform, most of the legal entities set up to take ownership of land (such as Communal Property Associations or trusts) are dysfunctional and fail to adequately secure the rights of their members. Again, effective government support for the establishment and operation of these institutions is sorely lacking.
In my view it is time for a fundamental re-think of tenure reform in all of its component parts. Founding assumptions on the nature of land rights in these different situations and contexts need to be critically reviewed. As Edward Lahiff (2009: 114) argues, this will probably require ‘the abandonment of private ownership as the prime model of landholding in land reform, and a much greater role for the state in land ownership and land rights administration’. However, the key constraint of limited government capacity and resources will also have to be factored into realistic policy formulation. Tenure reform thus continues to present us with enormous challenges and dilemmas. The sooner we acknowledge the scale of the problems, and the need to go back to the drawing board, the better.
The news that government will probably have to delay the achievement of the 30% target from 2014 to 2025 will anger many people. It will be seen as yet more evidence of Government’s failure to deliver on its promises — even of the failure of land reform. In my view, however, it is probably a blessing in disguise. The reality is that much damage has been done through the scramble to acquire hectares as quickly as possible. Especially in respect of land redistribution, this scramble had are two important consequences: first, the total number of households benefitting per year is still absolutely insignificant (not more than 5000, though it’s difficult to know for certain), because it turns out that it is easier to move hectares when working with small numbers of applicants rather than with many. Secondly, a high percentage of enterprises on land reform land fail altogether – not least because of rushed planning – meaning that there are far few ‘actual beneficiaries’ than the delivery data suggest. As a country with many urgent problems that need to be addressed, we cannot afford this. Even if the land were acquired for ‘free’, this would be too expensive.
There are in fact indications that we are getting closer to an understanding of how to conduct land reform in a way that contributes meaningfully to reducing poverty and unemployment, but we’re not there yet. But let’s suppose we get there soon. I predict that then the so-called ‘budget constraint’ will look very different, because in fact there is no constraint as such, just hard choices made by people who have decided – I think correctly – that in its present form land reform (and redistribution particularly) does not warrant more than the tiny budget share it now gets. When we can show that land reform can really make a difference, the budget constraint will fall away. Then we can talk about more realistic targets: 60%, 70%…..
One of the key issues I think we should confront in debating land and agrarian reform on this blog – and this is going to sound odd coming from a PLAAS researcher – is the relative marginality of ‘the agrarian question’ to mainstream South African politics. True, agrarian issues (colonial settlement, the 1913 land act, ‘black spot’ removals and related issues) figure centrally in accounts of the pre-democratic past. But other than rhetorically there is relatively little space for these issues in day-to day-politics. This is understandable: we are for the most part an urbanised country — and for most South Africans, agrarian issues are conceived of as a struggle that happens ‘out there’ in the countryside: the key stakeholders may be white farmers, or farm workers, or the rural landless — but not the urbanised masses. One reason is that for most of us in South Africa, our contact with the land and agriculture is mediated through the supermarket; these other troublesome issues burble away on a back burner and enter the national consciousness only when it looks as if the pot might boil over – when the DA tells us our property rights are under threat, or when someone invokes yet again the spectre of ‘what happened in Zimbabwe’.
This blog is premised on the notion that it is necessary to question these assumptions. The ‘agrarian question’ needs to be understood much more broadly than we have done until now; in fact there is not one but many agrarian questions. They do not only relate to the narrow issues addressed in our national land reform project, but to the structure and design of our agri-food system as a whole. More and more, recent events have highlighted that there is almost no aspect of the food and farming system in South Africa and abroad that we can simply take for granted.
Perhaps the most obvious sign of this was the global food price crisis in early 2008, which saw food price riots in 37 different countries across the globe. Although it did not impact as harshly in South Africa as it has elsewhere, this crisis demonstrated that the post-WTO agrarian order cannot assure food security for the word’s masses even in a year of relatively good harvests
More broadly, the multiple relationships between agriculture and broader environmental issues are becoming more evident. There is rising global concern, for example, about the meatification of the human diet, which has seen the population of farm animals, and in particular the big five (cattle, goats, sheep, chickens, and pork) grow faster than the human population — with massive implications for global warming. Livestock farming today is calculated to contribute to something like 20% of global warming, which is more than that attributed to vehicles.
Not unrelated was a report by the WWF at the World Water Week in Stockholm in 2008 that for one litre of actual water used by the average British consumer, they also used 31 litres of ‘virtual water’ in the form of irrigation intensive agricultural imports from often water-poor countries. This means that the average British consumer is in real terms, consuming more than 4 600 litres of water a day – as opposed to 1000 litres for the water footprint of the average citizen of developing countries. They warned that water is becoming the new oil — and agriculture is one of the key ways in which this crucial resource becomes unevenly allocated
Warnings are being sounded about the environmental toxicity of industrialised agriculture, with the ‘fertilizer treadmill’ in the world’s grainlands rapidly reducing microbial biodiversity. Only in the last months, worrying reports have come out about a massive decline of bee populations in Europe, the UK and the United States. Suddenly the warning sounded by Rachel Carson more than 40 years ago in her famous book Silent Spring, the book that put the modern environmental movement on the map, seems uncomfortably close to coming true. We are indeed looking at a world in which the overuse of pesticides and herbicides may be fundamentally disrupting the underlying ecosystems on which plant propagation depends.
How are these crises to be met? When world leaders met at the FAO summit in Rome in May this year, their answer was essentially to call for ‘more of the same:’ deepen the green revolution, intensify agricultural productivity. Others in the anti-globalization movement say that the problem lies with the international food order itself, and that it needs to be fundamentally revised if our children are not to starve.
None of these are questions we can ignore.In her book Women Learning the NAFTA food chain: Women Food and Globalization, Deborah Barndt captured many of these issues very well. She pointed out that food plays a unique role in connecting us to broader global systems and processes. On the one hand it is ‘the intimate commodity;’ it is the one commodity that, in the act of consumption, becomes part of our bodies. On the other, these choices connect us directly to often distant locales, entities, processes, and ecosystems. Decisions about how we produce, how we consume, and how food chains are regulated and shaped have a politics, and have consequences that are often transmitted across great distances to impact on people’s lives.
Mary Simons, a feminist teacher of politics at the University of Cape Town, used to thrill her first years by remarking that ‘when a man and a woman go to bed together – that’s politics.’ Now I might say, slightly less dramatically but as accurately, that when you buy a packet of organic carrots at Woolworths, or when you dig into a beef steak at the Spur … or when you plant a seed … that’s politics. I hope that on this website, we can connect the politics of land reform narrowly conceived – the politics of land transfers, land rights, and local livelihoods, with the broader contestation of the Southern African agro-food system.
Source: The Presidency 2009
In recent months, as the first post-election glow faded, all eyes have been on President Zuma to see how he would go about living up to his election promises – in particular his promise to be a president who cared more – and who did more for the interests of rural people. One of his first actions was to launch, on 14 September 2009 a presidential hotline. The hotline is meant to give South Africans direct access to government ears so that they can lodge their complaints (or compliments) on service delivery matters. Statements were made in the media by Zuma who apparently had handled some of the first phone calls himself. One of these first callers, an elderly woman from Mount Frere, was having trouble accessing her deceased husband’s pension money from his employer’s pension fund. Zuma stated that staff would follow up on this matter until the money had been handed to her. And of course, he added, after dealing with some initial hiccups in the start up phase of the initiative, the presidential hotline call centre existing of 43 call centre staff, would continue to answer calls and follow up each and every one of them until a satisfactory result had been reached.
Many of the criticisms in the media on this ambitious undertaking have focused on the functioning of the hotline itself, especially whether the average caller has been able to get through, and how long one must wait in a queue before a call is either answered or spontaneously cut off.
Clearly this is a valid concern. A hotline that doesn’t answer your call clearly isn’t very hot to begin with. But my concern is not whether individual callers will be able to get the ear of government and be heard by ‘patient and humane’ call centre staff, as instructed by the President. Nor is it if those lucky ones that do get through will eventually have their problem resolved by ‘immediate, professional, efficient’ action from local, municipal or other civil servants. What worries me is the implicit assumption behind this approach to tackling service delivery issues.
Source: DRDLR 2009
With the new emphasis on rural development on the political agenda, rural communities keenly await a rural development programme that will create another countryside for them and future generations — one with jobs and a vibrant economy, equitable services delivery, access to land and support for food security and agriculture. In February this year the then Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel allocated R3-billion for increasing South Africa’s agricultural output, supporting small-scale farmers and raising rural incomes in 2009/10, describing these as key elements of the country’s rural development strategy. It then became part of the presidential priorities under the Zuma administration. With this, one might think, the rural development foundation was laid and government could focus on successful implementation.
But perhaps this optimism is a bit misplaced. On 13 – 14 October 2009 the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) hosted the Stakeholders conference on Rural Development in Pretoria. Overcome with a sense of déjà vu images of the Land Summit in 2005 flared up as a group of fellow conference-goers and I sat huddled in a small business centre at the hotel where we stayed, revisioning clear rural development messages from civil society, identifying key concerns from current and past experiences and again dusting off the key resolutions from the Summit including abandoning the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ approach.
On the one hand, there were grounds for hope and excitement and optimism to be part of a process to frame a new roadmap for rural development. This conference kick-started a process for the development of a Green Paper on Rural Development and Land Reform. For the sector it was an opportunity to think big and revision rural areas – a fresh rethinking of land reform as part of broader agrarian transformation and to discuss both aspects in the context of stimulating rural development. It was also a significant moment for civil society. A fragile and fragmented civil society came together with a renewed willingness to develop a common civil society voice in support of a realistic and achievable plan for rural development.
However, a few red lights started flickering when the two-day discussion started. While we were all ready to grab rural development by the horns the Department appeared to a certain extent overwhelmed and – one might even say – directionless, right at the moment when we were all looking to it for leadership in beginning a process of developing a vision for our rural areas. There was little sense of the future we were reaching for. Nor was there a sense of the past: as a World Bank visitor pointed out, there were no points on the agenda with insights into international experiences and perspectives on rural development and the department did not give a reflection of lessons from the past, etc. The whole process started off in a vacuum… and a telling picture of a mud hut and a satellite dish at the end of the DRDLR’s presentation on their concept of comprehensive rural development, at the opening of the conference. I was quietly wondering at that point if the picture captured the DRDLR’s vision for rural areas?
Welcome to the blog of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies! Here, PLAAS researchers will be setting out their views and findings on key aspects of the politics and economics of land and agrarian change in Southern Africa. PLAAS, of course, has been doing this for some time: since 1995, it has been doing cutting-edge use-oriented basic research on these issues. We have published extensively, and much of our research is available from our website here.
In this website, however, we are trying something different. Increasingly, we have come to believe that our research and our questions should not only be directed at an audience of specialists. True, ’speaking truth to power’ is one important way in which engaged social scientists can contribute: good research and good policy advice, aimed at decisionmakers who can make a difference, is one way in which organizations like PLAAS can have impact.
But change does not just come from policymakers. Policy in South Africa needs to be forged in democratic debate, and a key role for PLAAS is to contribute to that debate, making democracy stronger by ensuring that there is an independent voice speaking forthrightly to the core issues — and providing independent perspectives and reliable information to other participants in the debate.
This blog is one attempt to do this. Here, you will encounter various researchers and commentators linked to PLAAS as an organization — either as researchers or as associates. This will be a space where we — and you — can speak and argue and debate about key issues relating to land and agrarian change in the subcontinent. Research and theory and data will figure heavily here. But it will not be a purely academic space. Hopefully the articles posted here will not only be well researched and rigorously argued, but also punchy, thought-provoking, even provocative. (This is why PLAAS researchers will be publishing in their individual capacities. You may even find us disagreeing with one another from time to time… and we certainly h0pe you will join the debate!)
We from the editorial team — for now, that’s Obiozo Ukpabi, our Policy Dialogue Officer, and myself, as Acting Director — will exercise our editorial responsibilities with a light hand. All points of view are welcome here. Hate speech, personal attacks, and offtopic posts will of course be deleted. We hope you enjoy this blog, and that you enjoy taking part.
