(NOSEWEEK) WHY THE RURAL POOR NEED LAND

WHY THE RURAL POOR NEED LAND
Issue # 42 - January 2003

For a significant number of South Africans facing starvation, subsistence farming may be the only means of survival and, with the right inputs from the state, could even make a positive contribution to the economy, argues Ben Cousins

According to Philip du Toit of the Agricultural Employers’ Association, land redistribution is failing because it gives productive commercial farms to black people “with no experience, or even interest, in farming”. Noseweek’s editorial asserts that “as few black as white South Africans want to be farmers”, and that giving farmland to the rural poor is devoid of moral or political integrity.

Many people see redistributive land reform as a “dangerous fallacy” with little potential for reducing chronic poverty. It is also seen as a threat to efficient and strategically important commercial agriculture, unless carried out “appropriately”.

“Appropriate”, in this view, entails helping a small number of emergent farmers with land, finance, and skills. (This is the premise underlying government’s current Land Redistribution and Agricultural Development programme.)

While these views resonate with mainstream development thinking in SA, they are deeply mistaken insofar as they ignore the central problem. Giving commercial farms to “appropriate” black farmers will, at best, deracialise commercial farming. But where does that leave the mass of rural poor?

For some, the future of rural people lies in cities. For others it is the basic income grant, or public works. Government policy seems to assume the answer is in trickle-down benefits from the formal economy as it competes in global markets, plus a little welfare.

But, growing unemployment, disillusionment with the informal economy, mushrooming shack settlements near the cities, and a widening gap between incomes and the cost of basic services show these “solutions” to be wishful thinking.

There is no once-off, one-size-fits-all solution, but land reform offers a more realistic alternative for many rural people. Of course, land alone is not enough. Support with research, training and marketing are as important for the rural poor as they are for urban small enterprise. They need draught power, tools, fencing, seeds (or the cash to purchase them), transport, access to markets.

Utopia? Where’s the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to deliver all that backup, you ask? It’s difficult, but not impossible. We need realistic agents of development. It’s been done before, ironically in Zimbabwe in the 1980s. We have the colleges to train them. We can’t afford to fail.
These are the real-world economic conditions in which small-scale producers can seek to wrest a livelihood while securing themselves from hunger and debt. With no support services available to the rural poor (or the urban poor for that matter), small wonder swathes of arable land in the communal areas remain uncultivated, that young people are uninterested in farming, that the priority for many rural people is “a job”. What appears a lack of interest is often a realistic appraisal of the extremely adverse prospects of making a living from the land.

Our leadership see rural areas as places people have to leave, not places to be developed. That policy can be changed. Of course, there is a price-tag, and cost-benefit ratios are important. This requires policies to be appropriate, feasible, and cost-effective. Present land reform and rural development policies in SA are none of these. Prejudice against small-scale farming and land-based livelihoods means that only commercial agriculture is seen as real agriculture.

But research shows that so-called “subsistence” production is undervalued. Subsistence farming households use low-cost inputs, but under the right conditions can be extremely productive and resource-efficient, to the point where they produce surpluses for market. Often they combine a variety of activities, including agriculture, natural resource harvesting and non-rural sources of income. This is no idyll – small-scale farming is hard work and yields only a modest income. But it can contribute to reducing extreme poverty.

An obsession with large-scale farming leads to the promotion of highly inappropriate land reform projects. Most of the more notorious collapsing projects are huge, over-capitalised enterprises of the old “homeland” agricultural corporations. (The Lusikisiki project rightly criticised by Du Toit is an updated version of the same: instead of an apartheid propaganda “showcase” we have a Soviet-style farming collective run by the state as a public relations exercise where cost-benefit is not calculated in terms of agricultural production.)

They illustrate the underlying problem: the complete lack of fit between policies and the realities – and potentials – of rural livelihoods.

Failing programmes based on misleading paradigms should not lead us to abandon land redistribution. Given the massive problem of rural poverty, and the political power of land as a symbol of dispossession, we should expand the thrust of land reform, but within radically redesigned policy frameworks and implementation systems. That is the best and most realistic hope for South Africa’s rural poor

n Professor Ben Cousins directs the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His article is a response to ‘What happened to the promised land?’ (nose41) n