Shared Interest News

In his State of the Nation address to Parliament this month, President Thabo Mbeki, acknowledging that “little progress has been made in terms of land redistribution,” pledged to find ways to speed up the land reform program. The government aims to transfer about 30 percent of agricultural land to black people by 2014. Currently about 4 percent of land has been transferred since 1994, with about 80 percent of agricultural land still held by whites.

The racial division of land, formally imbedded by the Land Act of 1913 only three years after the formation of the Union of South Africa, long predates coinage of the word “apartheid.” And dealing with its consequences today involves not only the difficult and contentious questions of transfer of land ownership (”land reform”). It also requires addressing the even tougher issues of how to promote sustainable livelihoods for rural people (”agrarian reform”).

Shared Interest are already providing credit guarantees and technical assistance to small farmers and cooperatives for projects that are cultivating grain, sugarcane and mushrooms, and raising pigs, chickens and trout. But we understand that what is needed is not only an accumulation of small projects but also structural reform. As background to our supporters, in this update we provide a brief overview of the issues, a short set of links to additional sources, and the text of a 2005 statement from the Alliance of Land and Agrarian Reform Movements (ALARM) outlining the challenges that still lie ahead.
Donna Katzin
Executive Director, Shared Interest
P.S. Earlier Shared Interest updates, available at http://www.sharedinterest.org, have provided background on this and related issues, highlighting both achievements and obstacles to transforming South Africa’s inherited structures of inequality.

“A New Phase of the Struggle”

Eugene Novuka is a director of the Makhoba Trust, an organization of the Makhoba clan. He recalls that during the early days of apartheid, his people were forcibly removed. White soldiers arrived with a large cannon in tow, and fired a cannon ball into a wall in the village that shook the very land and its people. All of the Makhobas were loaded into trucks and scattered in different locations. It took Eugene’s father two months to find where his parents had been dumped – 150 kilometers away on the other side of the hills.

Eugene returned to his community when it regained its ancestral land as the result of a successful claim resolved by South Africa’s land restitution process in 1996. Eugene recalled, “we saw how others had developed the area. We wanted to supply food for the nation.” They noted that white farmers had used the land to grow walnuts, beef, cattle, sheep and maize, and had even had a cheese factory. “You can have a lot of vision,” he reflected, “but the problem is finance.”

Together with technical advisors (AFGRI), the community designed a project to produce maize for commercial sale on South Africa’s SAFEX exchange with the help of a Shared Interest-guaranteed loan, with the help of a Shared Interest guarantee to back a loan from First National Bank (FNB).

“We are in a new phase of the struggle now,” he explained. “Economic development. Our main aim is to change the environment – to teach people to be independent. To get freedom you have to work for it.”

Land Reform and Agrarian Reform 

Speeding up land reform is high on South Africa’s political agenda this year, with the government pledging to accelerate the process, as organizations in both rural and urban areas become more vocal in demanding access to land.
veryone agrees that progress has been slow, impeded by resistance from white farmers, lack of clarity in government policy, limited budgets, care to avoid chaotic land appropriations that could spur economic decline like that of Zimbabwe, and, finally, the sheer complexity of the task. But the pressure to move ahead is rising.

Land Restitution

The program that has advanced the most is land restitution — designed to restore properties for which specific claimants could document loss of land due to discriminatory laws, and submit their claims by December 31, 1998. Of 79,696 claims submitted, the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights had settled about 89 percent, with government negotiating payment to the current owners. The remaining claims are to be settled by March 2008, with the government reserving the right to appropriate the land should owners continue to stall on negotiating a fair price.

Land Redistribution

This program, intended to transfer land to black farmers, has been based on the principal of willing seller / willing buyer. It has thus been dependent on market prices and budget limitations. Between 1994 and 2004 the Department of Land Affairs — receiving no more than 0.5% of the national budget — transferred about 1.0% of commercial agricultural land. By 2004, only 4.2% of commercial agricultural land had changed hands, including properties reallocated through land restitution. This compares with the target of 30% of agricultural land, originally set for 1999, and now for 2014. In 2005, the South African government hosted a Land Summit with representatives from all sectors dealing with the land issue, ranging from white farmers to progressive non-governmental organizations to landless communities, government officials, and academic specialists. Since the Summit, the South African government has agreed to review the willing seller/willing buyer principle and to allocate more resources to land reform.

Agrarian Reform

How much land changes hands is undoubtedly important, and will undoubtedly continue to be the major focus of news coverage. Most analysts, however, say that there will be no successful “land reform” unless and until government addresses the broader issues of “agrarian reform.” In fact, the livelihoods of poor families concentrated in rural areas depends not only on greater access to land, but also on addressing the issues key to their survival and sustainability. These include access to credit and technical assistance required to use the new land productively, as well as living wages for both farm workers and their family members working in the urban economy. Agricultural employees need protection for their salaries and rights, and it is unlikely that most either can or will want to be provided with plots of land instead of better working conditions.

Providing land is simply not enough. In Limpopo province, for example, 60 percent of black farmers living on land returned to them through the restitution program (with minimal financial and technical support) are reported to have failed. In other cases, they have sold or leased the land back to white farmers. The challenge is to provide comprehensive support, including but not limited to land, in order to create opportunities for sustainable livelihoods.

Agricultural Support Services

Recognizing this reality, the South African government has been expanding services such as the Microfinance Institute of South Africa MAFISA), to provide credit and savings for rural communities. Commercial farmer groups such as the Agri SA federation are involved in talks with government and non-governmental organizations on all aspects of agricultural policy.
Shared Interest, with its partner Thembani, are actively involved in bringing its approach of credit guarantees to leverage the impact of government and private-sector schemes that can help small farmers and cooperatives. Such services cannot by themselves do the job of social and economic transformation that is needed, or alter the stubborn fact of budget limitations. But with the creative use of partnerships, we can insure that limited resources have the maximum impact in improving the futures of families and communities.

Additional sources  

1. IRIN Web Special on Land Reform in Southern Africa, http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx? ReportId=44747
2. Blood and Soil: Land, Politics and Conflict Prevention in Zimbabwe and South Africa. International Crisis Group. 2004.http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm? l=1&id=2998
3. Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape. http://www.plaas.org.za/
4. The Land Question in South Africa: The challenge of transformation and redistribution, edited by Lungisile Ntsebeza and Ruth Hall. Purchase or free download from http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/

Alliance of Land and Agrarian Reform Movements (ALARM) Memorandum of Demands to the National Land & Agrarian Reform Summit, 27-31 July, 2005
This and other related documents from the summit are available on the site of South Africa’s Department of Land Affairs:  http://land.pwv.gov.za/publications/Land_Summit/Land _Summit.htm
August 1, 2005 

• Scrap market based land reform
• Make another countryside possible: the state must drive land and agrarian reform
• The state must actively and aggressively use expropriation for land redistribution
• Re open the date for Land Redistribution Claims
• End farm dweller evictions
• Review the Communal Land Rights Act
• Promote and develop sustainable livelihoods
• A consultative, representative and democratic Post Summit Process

Background
This memorandum is a collective contribution from landless communities, rural dwellers, national and provincial NGOs, landless people’s organisation, small farmers and producer groups, housing NGOs, the environmental sector as well as the South African Communist Party (SACP) to the National Land and Agrarian Reform Summit and to the Ministry of Land Affairs and Agriculture in particular.

As we enter the second decade of democracy, our sector has gained valuable experience in organising the rural poor to access land, technical services, infrastructure and financial support. In addition the sector has been able to gain knowledge of alternative methods for land use planning within the existing land reform programme. We have gained experience in working with farm workers in struggles to secure their rights both as workers under the LRA and as tenants under ESTA.
We have supported residents of communal areas in there to protect their rights. We have patiently waited to reclaim dispossessed land. Still others have been actively involved in the “massive food production” schemes as well as in the public private partnerships to grow cotton, beet or olives. Ten years have yielded much, and we are well equipped to engage in policy debates given the experiences we have gained over the past ten years.

Our memorandum is guided by these concrete experiences and the belief that we can contribute meaningfully to development of a new land and agrarian reform programme that can overcome rural poverty, rural underdevelopment and historical inequality and injustices.

The sector sees the land Summit as an important moment in the history of our new democracy. We are conscious that this is not the first Summit organised by the Ministry but believe that the decision to call the land Summit is inspired by the by the energies, demands, aspirations, interests and struggles of the landless and their organisations over the last 11 years.
We are participating in the Summit, despite the problems of short notice and lack of clarity over its objectives, because we view it as an opportunity to engage all stakeholders and particularly the Government, on the challenges of rural poverty, food insecurity, landlessness and massive unemployment. We are also painfully aware that there were previous summits held before which took resolutions. Up to this day we have not received reports on the implementation of these resolutions.

Rural poverty as it exists today is as result of the underdevelopment of the countryside, the dispossession of rural people of the means of productive natural resources such as land, water and forests. The process of dispossession deskilled and alienated people from land based livelihoods. It created a severe dependency on hand outs and remittances, which continues today.

An issue that requires urgent attention is the situation of Farm dwellers. The estimated 5.3 million black South Africans living on commercial farms remain amongst the most vulnerable people in South Africa. They are subject to ongoing evictions, slave wages, disruption of family life and social unacceptable reality continues despite the legislation that has been enacted since 1994 to regulate and give farm dwellers limited rights. This reality goes against the demands of the Freedom Charter, the provisions of the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the contents of the Rural Development and Landless People’s Charters which are not even acknowledged as relevant documents in the current land reform programme.

Similarly, the enactment of the Communal Land Rights Act was supposed to ensure community control and ownership of communal land, the extension to rural women of equal rights in land, and democratic control of local land administration bodies. Sadly, it has done none of these things, and needs to be scrapped and replaced with a more appropriate law.
Regardless of all these challenges, we believe that another countryside is possible and that South Africa can redress rural poverty and rural underdevelopment through implementing an integrated land and agrarian reform programme. However for this to materialise, change must take place in the following areas: 

• Fundamental policy review and policy change that includes attention to key macro economic policies;
• A restructuring of land and agrarian reform policies so that they favour small producers and land hungry rural communities;
• A strengthening of the land rights of farm dwellers and the residents of communal areas;
• Rapid release of land by farmers, land owners and the state for utilisation by farm dwellers and other landless people;
• A re organisation of support mechanisms and services for the beneficiaries of land and agrarian reform; and
• A renewed commitment to sustainable development is needed.

After ten years, it is clear that the current market based model of land reform has not yielded the desired results of transferring land to the poor and redressing past injustices. It has also failed to provide adequate support services to small producers who continue to live under extremely vulnerable conditions. The most productive land in South Africa is still in the hands of white commercial farmers who continue to be the main beneficiaries of agricultural policy. Land reform policy as it currently exists places too much power in the hands of land sellers.