Browsing Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) by Title
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Odendaal, Willem (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This brief examines some emerging trends and dynamics in changing power relations in rural Namibian communities due to emerging new elites and the threats to subsistence farmers’ access to communal land and natural resources. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/601 Files in this item: 1
PB 33.pdf (263.8Kb) -
Hall, Ruth (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: The new cabinet ushered in after the 2009 national elections features new and renamed ministries. Those expected to take the lead in a new initiative to resuscitate the rural economy are the Ministry of Rural Development and Land Reform and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. While the newfound priority placed on rural development is welcome, its separation from the dynamic subsectors in the rural economy is not. This brief shows how existing policies are bifurcated between BEE models for the better off and welfare for the poor. There is now a danger that the two ministries will replicate the dualism of the so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ economies – an approach that deepens exclusion from and legitimises exploitation in the economic core, and prevents the creation of a ‘missing middle’ of successful small producers. What is needed instead is rural development that restructures the commercial sectors of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and the exploitative class relations (with workers and small producers) on which they are based, and which breaks down the concentration of capital and market power in few hands. Only then can redistributing land, forests and fishing quotas create new pathways for ‘the rural poor’ to participate, and produce, in these sectors in ways that create livelihoods and jobs, and set South Africa on a different and more appropriate growth path. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/69 Files in this item: 1
Hall_Fresh2009.pdf (351.8Kb) -
Manjengwa, Jeanette; Mazhawidza, Phides (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: A bolder policy approach and more vigorous implementation are needed to support women’s empowerment, transfer of land rights to women, and to ensure their productive utilisation of land. The land reform programme focussed on racial imbalances of highly skewed land holdings and discriminatory land tenure systems while failing to mainstream the interests of women. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/87 Files in this item: 1
Manjengwa_Gender2009.pdf (348.8Kb) -
Tilley, Susan; Nkazane, Ntombizabantu; Lahiff, Edward (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: This report examines the efforts of the Groenfontein-Ramohlakane Trust to develop and use the land in (Mpumalanga) that has been restored to the community in terms of the Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994 (‘Restitution Act’). It examines the nature and content of the post-settlement support received and draws lessons from the community’s experience that might inform the development of a strategy for post-settlement support provision involving land reform institutions and associated agencies. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/79 Files in this item: 1
Tilley_Groenfontein2007.pdf (1.241Mb) -
Cousins, Ben (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This report describes the ‘living law’ of land in one part of Msinga, a deep rural area of KwaZulu-Natal. It presents research findings from the Mchunu and Mthembu tribal areas, where a three-year action-research project was carried out by staff of the Mdukutshani Rural Development Programme. Launched in 2007, at a time when implementation of the Communal Land Rights Act of 2004 (CLRA) appeared imminent, the project aimed to gain a detailed understanding of land tenure in Msinga, facilitate local-level discussion of potential solutions to emerging problems around land rights, provide information on the CLRA to residents and authority structures, and help generate ideas on how local people could engage with the new law. Meetings, interviews and focus groups convened by the project between 2007 and 2009 generated lively discussions and debates on a range of issues and problems related to land tenure in Msinga. Policy-makers need to consider how to convene conversations of this kind, on a large scale, before they launch a new round of tenure reform policy formulation and law making. Our experience suggests that well designed processes are critically important to ensure informed discussion, but also that ordinary rural people, not just their leaders, are more than ready to engage in debates about policies that could have major impacts on their lives. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/390 Files in this item: 1
CousinsLandMsinga2011.pdf (3.011Mb) -
Hall, Ruth (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: This report investigates emerging trends evident in the limited literature available on the impact of land restitution on livelihoods, and suggests ways of thinking about, and planning for, livelihoods. The report has a two-fold emphasis: its primary focus is on rural restitution claims where land has been restored, but it also addresses rural land reform more generally. Where land ownership has been transferred to land reform beneficiaries, similar patterns and challenges may arise, regardless of whether the land was acquired through the redistribution or the restitution route. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/90 Files in this item: 1
Hall_Impact2007.pdf (1.418Mb) -
Tilley, Susan (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: This paper provides some insights into international experience and attempts to distil the key areas of strategic value for consideration in developing a national strategy for support provision to land reform beneficiaries in South Africa. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/74 Files in this item: 1
Tilley_International2007.pdf (1.269Mb) -
Tapela, Barbara (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: This report is based on research carried out between June 2003 and April 2005 in the Greater Sekhukhune Cross-Border District Municipality, which straddles the boundaries of the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces. This research took place in two case-study sites, namely the Hereford and the Phetwane Irrigation Schemes. However, this report focuses on findings from Hereford only. The research was primarily concerned with the impact of BEE, articulated through joint ventures, on the ‘livelihoods’ of people living in emerging small-scale irrigation schemes in some of the least affluent rural areas within the municipality. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/71 Files in this item: 1
Tapela_Joint2005.pdf (816.7Kb) -
Turner, Stephen (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape & Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere Inc. (CARE), 2005)[more][less]
Abstract: The study compares the livelihoods and inter-household sharing mechanisms in a Lesotho village across a 28 year period. The report examines the complex socio-economic structures and systems that are in place in the rural village. Despite external signs of improved housing standards, the study finds ominous signs of growing vulnerability as much of the community's economic backbone has been lost. Options for assistance by external agencies and by social protection systems are explored. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/70 Files in this item: 1
Turner_Livelihoods2005.pdf (882.4Kb) -
Hall, Ruth; Cousins, Ben (NISC (Pty) Ltd and Taylor & Francis, 2013)[more][less]
Abstract: Land and agrarian reform has the potential to expand South Africa’s rangeland commons and enhance their contribution to the livelihoods of the rural poor, yet to a large extent this has been an opportunity missed. Shifting policy agendas have prioritised private land rights and commercial land uses, seeking to dismantle the racial divide between the white commercial farming areas and the ex-Bantustans by allocating former white farms to black farmers. These agendas and planning models reflect class and gender bias and a poor understanding of common property. If reform policies are to contribute to the reduction of high levels of rural poverty and inequality, then greater recognition of the potential role of livestock production on the commons must inform policy and planning. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/645 Files in this item: 1
HallLivestock2013.pdf (31.54Kb) -
Isaacs, Moenieba; Hara, Mafaniso (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: This research investigated the drivers and the impact of HIV and Aids in fishing communities in South Africa, in order to assist the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism: Marine and Coastal Management (DEAT:MCM) with mainstreaming of HIV and Aids into policy on fisheries. The research was based on in-depth analysis of four fishing communities in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/67 Files in this item: 1
Isaacs_Mainstreaming2008.pdf (319.2Kb) -
Neves, David; Du Toit, Andries (Cambridge University Press, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: This article examines the interplay of agency, culture and context in order to consider the social embeddedness of money and trade at the margins of South Africa’s economy. Focusing on small-scale, survivalist informal enterprise operators, it draws on socio-cultural analysis to explore the social dynamics involved in generating and managing wealth. After describing the informal sector in South Africa, the article elucidates the relationship between money and economic informality. First, diverse objectives, typically irreducible to the maximization of profit, animate those in the informal sector and challenge meta-narratives of a ‘great transformation’ towards socially disembedded and depersonalized economic relationships. Second, regimes of economic governance, both state-led and informal, shape the terrain on which informal economic activity occurs in complex and constitutive ways. Third, local idioms and practices of trading, managing money and negotiating social claims similarly configure economic activities. Fourth, and finally, encroaching and often inexorable processes of formalization differentially influence those in the informal sector. The analysis draws on these findings to recapitulate both the ubiquity and centrality of the sociality at the heart of economy, and to examine the particular forms they take in South Africa’s informal economy. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/834 Files in this item: 1
NevesInformalEconomy2012.pdf (129.6Kb) -
du Toit, Andries (Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape., 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This paper considers the role of ‘measurement’ and other forms of poverty knowledge in a context where the nature and direction of global economic growth is creating ‘surplus populations’ suffering various forms of marginalisation in the global economy. It links the development of different forms of poverty knowledge with the ways in which states and non-state agents seek to ‘govern’ poverty and poor populations, and with the ‘biopolitics’ whereby calculations are made about the differential allocation of resources towards different sectors of the global population. The paper argues that addressing the root causes of poverty requires social actors to go beyond the narrow limits of institutionally sanctioned and bureaucratically invested ‘poverty knowledge’ that currently dominate policy thinking. Rather than seeking to understand poverty by measuring the characteristics of members of populations, they should try to understand poverty as an aspect of social relations, and try to come to grips with differential insertion of populations in the fields of force of modern globalised capitalism. Analysis should abandon simple notions of ‘marginalisation, and come to grips with the agency of poor people and the complex relationships between informality, marginality, exclusion and incorporation. Ultimately, however, a more nuanced understanding of the role of poverty knowledge in present day biopolitics does not bring with it any easy answers: rather, it challenges applied social scientists to be more aware of the responsibilities they bear as producers of 'useful' knowledge in a time of increased global instability. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/580 Files in this item: 1
WP20.pdf (622.6Kb) -
Cliffe, Lionel (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: Since the 2005 Land Summit, new approaches to land reform have been on the agenda, yet there remains little clarity on the way forward. The main focus has been on means of accelerating the redistribution of land through new modes of acquiring land. Acquisition is an important matter but if treated in isolation risks mis-specifying the core problems evident in land reform in South Africa. A new phase of land reform located within a wider agrarian reform is needed and will require new institutional arrangements. Any alternative strategy will have to revise the institutional mechanisms that have been handling land reform thus far. Are the procedures and the institutions that are in place to design and implement land reform adequate and appropriate to the kind of new tasks envisaged? What new farming units and activities are intended, and what post-transfer support will be required to make this agricultural system productive? This paper explores mechanisms appropriate to one kind of agricultural alternative: a vision of a productive, small-scale essentially household farm sector. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/66 Files in this item: 1
Cliffe_Policy2007.pdf (365.8Kb) -
Kleinbooi, Karin (National Inquiry Services Centre (NISC) (Pty) Ltd, 2013)[more][less]
Abstract: This paper aims to contribute to the debates on communal rangelands and analyses the gendered dimension of land rights and land access in the rural areas of Namaqualand. The actual gender relations within rural communities and the emergence of strategies that are being pursued in communal land processes are obscured and often ignored in policies about communal rangelands, which over-emphasise ‘the ecological and economic impact’ and the balancing of these dimensions. As active, primary users, women play a central role in livelihoods supported by communal rangelands yet their access to land is mediated through their relationships with men, effectively circumventing women’s land autonomy. A wider debate is necessary to advance the largely superficial policy considerations of women’s position in relation to communal rangelands land and their social exclusion on the basis of traditional control of land, forms of access and claiming of use rights. The paper discusses the complexity of land rights under communal land tenure and argues that, despite traditional and policy barriers, women in traditional systems of male-dominated land rights have had some success in accessing communal rangelands. Greater policy impetus is necessary to leverage equitable and independent land access for women amid debates about management of communal rangelands. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/772 Files in this item: 0
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Manenzhe, Tshililo; Lahiff, Edward (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2007)[more][less]
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Dubb, Alex (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2012)[more][less]
Abstract: This paper argues that the rise and decline of small-scale sugarcane grower (SSG) production in KwaZulu-Natal must be historically located within a changing structural relationship with miller-processors, in turn conditioned by shifts in regulatory frameworks. Critically, the emergence of SSG production in the late-1970s–1980s can be traced to industry-subsidised initiatives disguised as micro-credit which brought commercially inalienable Bantustan land into cane production with strong miller oversight. From the late 1980–1990s, however, the elimination of these subsidies encouraged millers to withdraw from direct oversight and to subcontract support to farmers, while simultaneously instigating an increase in SSG numbers by removing restrictions on grower registration. Enduring drought must certainly be understood as a central proximal factor in the rapid decline of SSGs, but their rapid increase in the first place was structurally fragile. This paper further strives to provide insight into the shifting class dynamics of SSGs under constrained conditions of production, utilising survey data from seventy SSG homesteads and life-history interviews in two rural wards of the Umfolozi region. Although proceeds from sugarcane have represented an important source of cash-income for homesteads, deteriorating terms of exchange and barriers to expansion in land and capital have placed a greater emphasis on sparse off-farm income opportunities for stabilising consumption and enabling limited re-investment in production. The centrality of income-diversification for simple reproduction and limited accumulation has rendered the dynamics of social differentiation both unstable and reversible. The paper concludes by exploring the implications for agrarian reform policy. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/571 Files in this item: 1
DubbSugarcaneFarming2013.pdf (913.9Kb) -
Greenberg, Stephen (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2010)[more][less]
Abstract: A strategy that seeks to insert smallholders into the large-scale, industrial, export-oriented model can only succeed in broadening and diversifying the producer base slightly. The large-scale model also brings with it the deepening problems of concentration in the value chain, which, in turn, entrench the production model. The ANC in government has identified the major contours of the challenge, but its responses tend towards seeking to deracialise that model while keeping its core intact. An alternative has to confront the existing economic power of commercial agriculture and agro-industry with the aim of transforming it in the interests of the poor. Deracialisation is necessary, but is not sufficient to realise this. The logic of a smallholder strategy must be followed beyond the farm gate, to the institutions that support agriculture and the value chains that feed off it. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/657 Files in this item: 1
RR40_0.pdf (1.186Mb) -
Aliber, Michael; Baiphethi, Mompati; de Satge, Rick; Denison, Jonathan; Hart, Tim; Jacobs, Peter; van Averbeke, Wim (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2009)[more][less]
Abstract: Within the ambit of the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative of South Africa, government is leading a process to define a Second Economy Strategy, and has identified the agricultural sector as a site of opportunity, potentially fostering a larger number of smallholder agriculturalists. In an effort to identify an implementable program to support the smallholder sector, this study closely analyses what makes particular South African smallholdings in various settings successful and what factors contributed to their success. A broad definition of agricultural smallholding is employed including independent operators, group farmers, subsistence farmers and commercial farmers. ‘Supporting the smallholder sector’ is conceptualised as consisting of four distinct strands, namely the prospects and measures for: improving the performance of subsistence-oriented smallholders; encouraging/enabling currently subsistence-oriented smallholders to benefit from a more commercial orientation; improving the performance of commercially oriented smallholders; and increasing participation in smallholder agriculture among those (especially rural dwellers) who do not practise agriculture. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/391 Files in this item: 1
AliberSmallholders2009.pdf (1.825Mb) -
Aliber, Michael (PLAAS, University of the Western Cape, 2011)[more][less]
Abstract: This second volume of Strategies to support South African smallholders as a contribution to government’s second economy strategy contains sixteen case studies that comprise the main data for the analysis detailed in Volume 1. This collection of case studies provides a useful resource on its own, providing a rich and diverse repository of narratives depicting various types of smallholders in diverse circumstances and environments. As researchers were given the latitude to deviate from a standardised approach, this volume reveals the authors’ different styles, different emphases, and indeed different disciplinary strengths. The ‘unit of analysis’ also differs across case studies: some are studies of single individuals, others focus on particular schemes or projects, and still others involve a comparative analysis of individuals or projects. Due to the complexity of categorising the case studies they have been simply grouped by province, and are ordered, roughly, from southwest to northeast. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/392 Files in this item: 1
AliberSmallholders2011.pdf (4.092Mb)