| dc.description.abstract | The wider context of our research and training, and the ultimate rationale for establishing and
maintaining a centre such as PLAAS, is the key challenge of deeply entrenched poverty, as well as
the inequality to which it is inextricably linked. A majority of citizens in South Africa, as in the
wider southern African region, are subject to an on-going crisis of livelihood vulnerability,
exacerbated by a raging HIV/Aids pandemic. These realities tend to empty formal democracy of
substantive content.
Poverty and vulnerability are deepest in rural areas where the majority of the region’s population
still lives. The greatest concentrations of such poverty are in those areas previously designated
exclusively for African settlement, the former ‘native reserves’, but poverty is also widespread in
the commercial farming sector. This sector has always paid extremely low wages, but has been
shedding jobs steadily for the past decade, and what jobs survive are largely casual or seasonal in
character. Poverty in both contexts has its origins in colonial policies of land acquisition, settlement
and economic development that dispossessed the indigenous majority of their land and created dual
and highly unequal political, social, legal and economic regimes. A similar legacy is found in
coastal communities in relation to unequal access to marine and coastal resources. | en_US |
