Rural women are likely to be the losers under the agriculture ministry’s new policy aimed at creating a class of black commercial farmers
Samuel Kariuki
The South African land reform programme has the potential of consolidating and expanding South Africa’s fragile democratic gains. But this process also has the devastating potential of fragmenting the vision and aspirations of 75% of South Africa’s rural population, who are locked in a vicious circle of poverty. Most of them are women and children. Hope and despair remain their only companions to see them through the new dispensation.
It is against this background that I wish to foreground some of the macro-limits of the current changes proposed by the Minister of Land Affairs and Agriculture, Thoko Didiza, in her policy statement entitled Strategic Directions on Land Issues, whose cardinal focus is to “gradually change the structure of South African agriculture by opening opportunities, thereby creating a significant number of black commercial farmers operating on medium and large scale”.
The policy in general aims to deracialise the agricultural sector. Given the fact that about 55E000 white farmers currently own 102-million hectares of land, side by side with 1,2-million micro-farmers who share about 17-million hectares in the former homelands, one would accord credence to the underlying objectives of the new policy. However, this exercise has the potential of re-configuring new and complex forms of “gender and class-based rural inequalities” which run against Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) objectives and, most important, the intended integrated rural development framework.
South Africa’s land reform programme is currently beleaguered by institutional, resource and ideological challenges which have locked the policy in a state of inertia. Most of these challenges were identified during the pilot phase of the programme in 1996 and similar criticisms were levelled at the government Green Paper (1996) and White Paper (1997) on Land Policy in South Africa. After five years of experience with land reform policy, a consensus has emerged that the current policy is unable to reflect the objectives of the RDP in achieving rural development and, at best, is least helpful in stimulating agrarian transformation. In essence, the programme has failed to generate “an engine of growth” for rural economies, which remain stagnated. The complex procedural nature of the policy itself has tended to disenfranchise rural communities.
This set of challenges is not unique to the South African context. Experience from other African countries (Kenya for instance) has clearly demonstrated that land reform policies which emerge from a process of a “negotiated transition to democracy” often tend to be mild and unable to comprehensively realign the skewed rural social relations in the countryside. Land reform programmes have come to epitomise the challenges of a country beset with the mammoth task of “reconstruction and development” and trying to balance the tension between the need to address often competing and contradictory interests and rights to land and the need to sustain and entrench democratic gains for all citizens.
There is a need to conceptualise the land reform process in South Africa as both a political and economic programme and a process set within a very limiting climate. That climate is defined at the national level by the dictates of reconciliation and nation building and at a global level by the need to peg the policy at par with the imperatives of a competitive international economic order. The latter is reflected in the state’s capacity constraints – related to the fiscal austerity of the growth, employment and reconstruction (Gear) policy – in allocating adequate financial resources to the land reform process.
Reading through the document, I concur with the article by Marianne Merten (“Observers concerned about new land reform policy”, Mail & Guardian February 18 to 24) which indicated that the new policy guidelines are bound to marginalise the “poorest of the poor” in an attempt to create an emerging class of black farmers. More so, class analysis studies in most African countries have warned of the potential of land reform programmes in increasing rural differentiation and even possibly creating community tension.
The new policy directives clearly point out the need to create a “black class of emerging farmers”. They are an attempt to reconceptualise the land reform process within the broader goal of effecting agrarian transformation in rural South Africa. However, in doing so, the new policy directives underplay the extent to which these initiatives would exacerbate social inequality in rural South Africa.
There are three sets of unintended and controversial issues in these policy directives. Firstly, the potential of the new policy directives to accentuate gender inequality in the countryside remains unattended; secondly, the new policy initiatives operate on the premise that potential beneficiaries would have the capacity to partake in this new venture; and, thirdly, the extent to which rural class polarity would emerge and possible community tension result is not taken into consideration.
Continued gender exclusion from the land reform process is a harsh reality confronting South Africa’s rural areas. This exclusion is partly due to the inability of the policy as a whole to set out the way in which one may go about achieving gender inclusion. The role traditional institutions have been accorded in the land reform process, for instance, has come to exacerbate this exclusion. The new policy directives, in addressing the new changes, ignore the fact that rural women would not be in a position to command an “effective demand” which would allow them to appropriate one of the three redistribution windows the directive offers. Markets are economic arenas of unequal power and political relations whose inherent logic is to marginalise those (the poor) who cannot participate.
For instance, those who want to appropriate the first window of the redistribution pillar, worth R30E000 (for small farmers), would have to contribute R10E000, and the grant would cover up to R20E000. With the second window, worth between R30E000 and R100E000 (for the medium farmers), farmers are expected to raise R35E000 and the grant would cover them up to R40E000. The remaining R25E000 would have to be accessed through a bank loan. For the third window of redistribution, total project costs can range up to R300E000. The grant would cover up to R60E000; the remainder would be covered through a bank loan worth R105E000 and the farmer’s own contribution of R135E000. These figures are far beyond the reach of the rural poor, who are certainly not targeted in this new initiative.
The new policy initiatives equally presume that interested community members will have the capacity to appropriate the policy to their own gain. This assumption is misleading; most community members, in particular those who are not accessible to the NGOs, are often unable to partake in such policy initiatives.
Gender exclusion and class polarity run against the very tenets of an integrated rural development framework. This framework tentatively spells out some of the strategies needed to achieve rural development. Among them is institutional development through community capacity- building and the need to uphold justice and gender equity in the rural areas. However, the new policy guidelines have expressed a “male bias”, in the sense that only those who have one form of wealth/income will be able to benefit from this process. Equally so, the guidelines have failed to recognise that “increased market participation” within the ambit of the new policy will only benefit rich black farmers at the expense of poor people.
It is envisaged that developing a class of “black farmers” would generate a positive linkage effect in rural economies. It is stated that “increased agricultural production and employment will strengthen linkages between farm and off-farm income- generating activities”. However, under the current agricultural support infrastructure one finds in South Africa, this increase is bound to be very incremental.
This is because of the historical “spill- over” effect of some of the skewed agropolicies that were in operation within agribusiness during apartheid and which enabled white commercial agriculture to thrive, though not under optimum production, despite the support they were accorded. Complementary agri-support infrastructures such as credit, co- operatives, extension services, infrastructural developments, are bound to be some of the overriding handicaps a “black emerging farmer” will have to grapple with.
The balance of power within agribusiness needs to be appraised in favour of all stakeholders within the agri-industry. Under the current neo-liberal economic framework the government is implementing, smallholder agriculture will only be a success story among well-resourced farmers.
It’s worth noting that the land question as characterised in other African countries is a highly complex and emotive issue embedded within powerful political and economic interests. Analogically, the land reform process is essentially a “fulcrum in a see-saw” that is used to balance competing and often contradictory rights to land.
The attainment of this balance is a contested process and the new policy directives point one way through. However, let us not lose sight of a section of South Africa’s population (the rural poorest of the poor) for whom access to land is a central prerequisite – and who, to date, have remained invisible in the land reform process.
Samuel Kariuki , a PhD candidate in rural sociology, teaches sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand