The Zimbabwe land disaster could spread into other Southern African countries if they do not implement and maintain effective land reform processes, say analysts in a report to be released by the Human Sciences Research Council on Friday.
The report combines the findings of experts from various organisations, including Oxfam, the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations, the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies in South Africa, the international development studies department at the University of Zimbabwe and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. They examined 10 countries, including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Swaziland.
”A cyclical element is evident in land reform policy in the region. An initially strong political commitment to land redistribution … has been followed by a switch of emphasis to so-called economic goals, rather than the eradication of landlessness and poverty … the cost of taking no effective action could be very high,” the report says.
According to the report, the governments of all the Southern African Development Community countries have generally failed to integrate land policy into a rural development strategy or a wider vision of social and economic development.
Land redistribution has been characterised by land grabbing, lack of land policy, lack of land tenure reform, wary relationships with donors and weak civil societies, as well as the sidelining of customary land rights.
”As in Zimbabwe, the lack of comprehensive rural development strategy, complete with practical and sustainable support programmes, means that an essential precondition for an improved land redistribution and land reform effort is absent. Without this any kind of land redistribution programme — even a well-regulated and non-violent one — will have little real impact.”
The report says these situations have developed because land redistribution processes have become appendages to policy reform rather than central to them because ”more acute concerns are facing these governments”.
The chronic land problems are a result of dispossession of Africans under colonialism and apartheid, which led to a lose-lose relationship between addressing historical memory and the problems with post-independence policies that have generally led to unequal ownership of land by elites, white or black.
This feeds into the debate about the purpose of land reform and whether the focus should be land redistribution for the landless masses or for fewer people ”who have the potential to contribute to economic growth and national prosperity”.
Organisations such as Oxfam and the World Bank argue that small-scale farms are invariably more productive and equitable than large-scale ones.
Others say the current context of Southern Africa should be more closely examined. Land redistribution to small-scale farmers does not translate to the ability to maintain a competitive edge in increasingly liberalised markets, they say.
This extends to a misfit between land policy and rural development where land reform is being pursued as a ”quasi-constitutional right” or as a means of redressing past injustices, rather than as a basis for sustainable rural livelihoods.
In South Africa, the government’s capacity to deliver land to the landless falls far below its target of transferring 30% of agricultural land by 2015. At the current rate of redistribution, it is unlikely to reach 5% by the target date.
Land redistribution is also painfully slow in Namibia, where the report says that corruptible national elites are claiming large areas where customary land rights prevail.
”There was certainly a feeling that neither South Africa nor Namibia was any closer to finding solutions and that grave consequences could await both countries if the current impasse was allowed to continue.”
But not all is doom and gloom. Some progress is being achieved through tenure reform. Botswana inherited a dual system of statutory and customary tenure at independence. Despite the contrasting characteristics of the two systems, ”it has developed a robust land administration”.
Mozambique has a progressive single law for the whole country and ”is committed to seeing it through”. Malawi has recently published its National Land Policy, designed to include land acquisition and resettlement on under-used land.
For the rest of the region, the report suggests that redress of historical injustices and the racial imbalance in land rights will only be effected if governments first develop a clear land policy that has widespread support, and then only proceeds to revise the laws to implement it.