9. South Africa

Photo: Georges Gobet/AFP

The persistent concentration of land along racial lines in South Africa will either be resolved through a fundamental restructuring of the government's land reform program, or it will be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of property relations by the people themselves. Which direction the country follows depends to a large degree on the urgent and immediate responsiveness of the government to the needs and demands of the country's 19 million mostly poor, black and landless rural people.

While in 1995 only 48% of population of South Africa lived in rural areas, fully 70% of the poor were found in the countryside. South Africa is one the countries with the worst social indicators, and 95% of the poor are black. Therefore, poverty is linked to rural areas and to racial issues.

The per capita income of a black person in South Africa is USD $271, while it is $3,207 for a white person. The average monthly wage for black people is USD $28 and $505 for white people. The legacy of Apartheid has left 87% of land ownership in the hands of just 60,00 white farmers, while literally millions of black people try to survive under over-populated conditions on the 13% of land. Some 7 million black people are workers or sharecroppers on white-owned farms.

Historical Overview

Relocation and segregation of blacks from whites started as early as 1658, when the Khoi were informed that they could no longer dwell to the west of the Salt and Liesbeck rivers, and in the 1800s, when the first reserves were proclaimed by the British and the Boer governments.
The Native Land Act was passed in 1913, which set aside only 10% of the land for black people. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act was enacted in 1959 to establish the Bantustans and make the reserves the political homeland of black South Africans. In the early 1960s, relocation camps were established. This was an attempt to remove displaced labor tenants, unwanted farm workers and unemployed urban people.

The Land Acts and other related land laws, settlement planning, forced removals and the Bantustan system, contributed to overcrowding in the former homelands. It is estimated that more than 3.5 million Africans were forcibly removed and relocated to the homelands and black townships between 1960 and 1980. The land dispossession of the black population in South Africa was driven by the need to reduce competition for white farmers and to create a pool of cheap labor to work on farming estates, mines and industry.

Even after Apartheid, the new Constitution of South Africa committed the country to a very conservative macroeconomic policy, giving priority to industrial expansion, exports and foreign investments.

The World Bank Model

Guiding by the World Bank, the new government began the implementation of a complex packet of agrarian reform measures. The land policy had three components: land restitution, land redistribution, and tenure reform. But the entire model is market-led. This market-based approach utilizes the forces of the market to redistribute land and is largely based on willing-buyer, willing-seller principles. The model is based on the principle of "efficiency" to assure and raise productivity, and a keystone is its ability to maintain "investor confidence."

Generally five economic criteria are used to judge the efficacy of World Bank policies and decisions regarding resource allocation. Four of the criteria relate to efficiency of the economic system, while the fifth one is for equity considerations. Thus, land can either be redistributed for purposes of efficiency or equity. These two terms, efficiency and equity are opposing economic terms which are often confused in many writings. Both of these cannot always be achieved at the same time in a given land redistribution.

As of the end of 2001, less than 2% of land had changed hands from white to black farmers through the land reform program. Of the 68,878 land restitution claims received, only 12,678 had been settled, benefiting less than 40,000 predominantly urban households, more than 40% of which received monetary compensation instead of land restoration. While monetary compensation is one form of redress, it cannot be considered agrarian reform because it does not involve the transfer of land rights.

Faced with this evident failure, the World Bank launched another program in 2001, which requires beneficiaries to make a minimum USD $500 contribution, clearly targeting "efficient" producers, which means the beneficiaries were to be the landowning black middle class, rather than the poor. The majority of the poor cannot make the minimum contribution, and thus do not qualify for land.

The current policy limits development in several ways: it seeks to concentrate resources in the hands of a small number of black commercial producers who are unlikely to spend much of their disposable income in the rural economy, while confining the poor majority to ongoing dependency on rural farm wages and paternalistic social relations; it limits the socially transformative impact of land reform to a small number of relative elites; and it delays the potential impact of asset redistribution on the ability of the poor to take economic risks and diversify their livelihood sources.

The State has revealed a real lack of political will, sticking to a narrowly legal discourse, without giving recognition to the importance of democratization of the economy, or the social function of land. Little attention is paid to the impacts of these policies on poverty and economic development.

The Landless Peoples Movement

In South Africa today the government seems to have given up on the poor, choosing instead to focus on creating an "efficient" black middle class. The government is concentrating its resources in the hands of a few black producers, provoking tense relations with the mass of poor laborers. Thus it is not surprising that landless black people have organized the Landless Peoples Movement (LPM), calling for an immediate people's land reform.

The movement grows out of the struggle against racism. It represents the voice of the masses who have mobilized to get access to land. It is a new movement, founded in 2001, which rejects the land market model. They have carried out land occupations, marches and sit-ins at government offices, calling for an end to forced removals of farm workers from large estates. The want to carry out a large campaign of occupations, and they are emphatic in saying that to solve the problem of landless people in South Africa one must tackle racism head on.
Popular participation, especially of young people and women, can be transforming for a movement. Combined with education, it can transform people's consciousness, and lead to recovery of self-esteem, helping oppressed people take charge of their lives.

Access to land strengthens the participation of the rural people in the labor market, beyond just generating employment. Agrarian reform is a key step toward creating more equitable paths to economic growth, which transfer income and power to the excluded.

Text based on THWALA, Wellington D. - The South African experience on land reform

10. Thailand

11. Zimbabwe

12. Positions of Via Campesina

13. Bibliography

14. Table of Contents