Three Southern African countries have sold out the region’s peasants in favour of quick profits and short-term political expediency, a new hard-hitting academic study warns
Sizwe samaYende and Justin Arenstein
The University of the Western Cape’s school of government claims the systematic betrayal of small-scale and subsistence farmers in Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe is causing a region-wide rural revolt that could shatter Southern Africa’s economy.
The university says peasants, who were promised land ownership and a real chance of prosperity with the advent of democracy, are instead being marginalised and kicked off their land in favour of rich foreign investors or privileged local consortiums.
The university’s latest Sustainable Livelihoods in Southern Africa report adds that even when governments attempt to deal with growing dissatisfaction, their policies and strategies have proved inadequate or impractical.
In post-apartheid South Africa two-thirds of the country is still owned by 60000 white landlords, while 14-million black subsistence farmers eke out a living in the former Bantustans.
“None of the three main components of the South African land reform programme, namely the restitution of land rights, land redistribution and tenure reform, have made a significant impact,” the report reads.
Restitution and redistribution have both, it contends, suffered from cumbersome and ineffective bureaucratic processes, as well as an over-reliance on market mechanisms to acquire land.
Tenure reform, which effects millions of rural workers, has also failed to prevent the eviction of long-term tenants on white-owned farms or halt the encroachment of private business on tribal and communal land.
A key flaw, university researcher Edward Lahiff notes, is the government’s failure to address the chaotic administration of communal land in former homeland areas where South Africa’s poorest citizens live.
“Land tenure reform has the potential to affect the largest number of people in the shortest time, but while the government has passed crucial laws it simply hasn’t put the necessary resources into enforcing them,” Lahiff explains.
Provincial administrations have, he said, been tasked with implementing the Extension of Security of Tenure Act but often only hired a single official to police an entire province.
“Not even the police, magistrates or other people in the justice system are sympathetic, so farm tenants aren’t taken seriously. Recent policy shifts, away from the pro-poor approach between 1994 to 1999, towards a commercial farming model and linked proposals to privatise communal land are also likely to even further diminish the benefits of land reform,” Lahiff warns. South Africa’s failings are not, however, unique.
Neighbouring Mozambique, where 75% of residents are rural and 60% live in “absolute poverty”, also favours big business and foreign investors over the livelihood of its peasants.
The country promulgated a reform land law in 1997 recognising the land rights of subsistence farmers, but has failed to honour the rights when challenged by corporate or foreign interests.
Massive tracts of Mozambique’s most fertile land are, Lahiff says, being concessioned to cash-rich investors without local indigenous farmers being notified or consulted.
“Available evidence suggests that the impact on the rural poor is entirely negative, with local people denied access to essential natural resources such as wildlife and indigenous forests,” he warns.
The investors also often impose exploitative contracts on local subsistence farmers, including sharecropping and labour tenancy agreements that hark back to colonial times.
“Notable among these new settlers are Afrikaner farmers from South Africa who have been granted vast concessions in Naissa and Zambezia provinces,” said Lahiff.
Dispossession is increasing as tourism and wildlife investors move into Mozambique, with concerns that thousands of families affected by the new proposed transfrontier park with South Africa haven’t been properly consulted or offered compensation.
Zimbabwe too neglected its rural poor until very recently, granting the best agricultural land to government supporters and political favourites.
“Zimbabwe was able to boast an impressive rise in production among small-scale farmers, but its attempts at land reform were implemented very slowly over the 21 years since independence, without any of the key targets being met,” said Lahiff.
“President Robert Mugabe was still allocating land to big farmers until just before land invasions began, and only changed the policy when it was politically expedient to do so.”
Instead of relieving the plight of the rural poor, the invasions of white and corporate-owned farms by Zanu-PF supporters, war veterans and landless peasants have so disrupted the agricultural economy that production has plummeted and food shortages are being reported.
“As a result, prospects for successful reforms may have been set back even as popular pressure reaches new heights,” said Lahiff.
The promised reforms are further limited by Zimbabwe’s technocratic, top-down approach.
“The poor quality of support services to resettled farmers and government’s neglect of tenure reform in communal areas has further limited potential benefits.”
The failings, which are common in all three countries, have prompted non-government organisations and peasants themselves to step into the breach.
NGOs such as Associao Rural de ajuda Mtua and peasant movements such as Unio Nacional des Camponeses in Mozambique have spearheaded a land campaign that has influenced legislation and is changing government’s policies.
In South Africa the national land committee hasn’t been as successful at creating a rural social movement but has managed to win wide audiences for its demands for faster and more radical land reforms.
The committee and its Mozambican counterparts also travelled to Brazil this week to learn from the apparent success of the Landless Workers’ Movement, which has resettled 542000 rural families or almost two million people on 18-million hectares of new farmland at a cost of $6,5-billion.
The African activists are, however, in for a disappointment.
Recent Brazilian studies indicate that the dream has soured, with resettled farmers defaulting on a debt of $450-million and up to 25% of all resettled farmers abandoning their plots within two years.
The problems cited by Brazilian settlers echo the challenges faced by their African counterparts, including competition from mechanised commercial estates, inadequate water, transport and electricity infrastructure and inefficient government support schemes.
National land committee deputy director Tom Lebert concedes the problems, but insists that Africans can still learn from the Landless Workers’ Movement’s success in mobilising the rural poor and holding government to its land promises.
“We’re going to learn from their successes, even if that means noting their failures. We are also going to build relationships with the 70000 land reform activists at the World Social Forum, so we can build an alliance against corporate globalisation,” said Lebert.
He stressed that the committee did not oppose South Africa’s attempts to produce black commercial farmers, but warned that not all subsistence farmers wanted or were able to go commercial.
“We believe land reform should primarily benefit the landless,” he said. African Eye News Service