In 1994 the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) set a target for the transfer of 30% of land to black ownership within 5 years. But 17 years later, no more than 7% has been transferred. What are the causes of this dismal performance?
First, the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ policy of the ANC government determined that the market was to drive land reform. In conditions where a small minority of the population owned the vast majority of land, land owners could respond to this new demand for land by hiking prices or by not selling to the state or black owners if they didn’t want to. It kept control over what land was redistributed, how and to whom in the hands of white land owners.State grants to assist blacks to buy land did not remedy this imbalance. At best they allowed blacks to participate on the margins of the market.
The second cause for the bleak performance was a reliance on the state bureaucracy to facilitate the transfer of land. Despite the political rhetoric surrounding land reform, the entire land affairs department has never received more than 1% of the overall national budget. This money was not only to buy land, but also to manage the system of private property through recording the extent and legal ownership of property.
This small budget was not enough to pay for what was needed even to achieve the modest targets for transfer established in the RDP. To this day, posts remain unfilled, especially at provincial and local levels where staff is most needed to implement land reform.
But even more importantly, the state stood in for the activity of the population. The message of land reform was that the state will deliver. Rural people, who once fought vigorously against encroachments on their access to land (even if they did not always win these battles), were exhorted to wait patiently in the queue for their turn. They were demobilised, and their turn to receive land never came.
The newly released Green Paper on Land Reform recognises some of the shortfalls in the policy. It points to the land acquisition strategy, fragmented support, the way beneficiaries are selected and a problematic restitution model as key policy weaknesses.
But none of this is fleshed out. Six years after the Land Summit, which called on government to scrap the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ policy, and two and a half years after the first announcement that a new Green Paper was to be written, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) has produced an 11-page document, essentially consisting of bullet points.
The Green Paper offers three principles underpinning land reform. We should agree with the first principle on deracialisation of the rural economy, even as we should also acknowledge that deracialisation within a capitalist context will produce widening class inequalities. Our opposition to class inequality notwithstanding, we should support deracialisation of ownership and power in principle.
The second principle on democratic and equitable allocation and use is spot on. Unfortunately it is not carried through into the remainder of the document. It becomes no more than an abstraction.
The third principle on strict production discipline for guaranteed national food security is somewhat more problematic. While we can agree that land reform must not disable the production of enough food for everyone, we must also be cautious of adopting a conservative approach suggesting that the only way to realise food security is to carry on with the production patterns we have inherited.
South Africa does produce enough food, in general, to meet domestic market needs. But this national level food security goes hand in hand with increasing hunger among the poor, who are not in the market because of their lack of resources to buy. Thirty-two per cent of children in South Africa regularly go hungry at present. Our national food security, using advanced production techniques and concentrated landholdings, does not translate into enough food for all at household and individual level.
Rhetorically at least, agricultural policy is gradually shifting towards recognition of the importance of smallholder agriculture as a necessary part of the response to rising social inequality and ecological destruction. Land reform has a critical role to play in this shift, in particular by breaking up farms on transfer so that many people can gain access to land. It is here that agriculture and land reform are thoroughly entwined. If farms are subdivided, this must go hand in hand with the provision of appropriate infrastructure for those with access to use the land productively. For example, water infrastructure needs to be extended to each subdivided portion of a broken-up farm.
But the Green Paper does not deal with this question at all. We can anticipate that farms will continue to be transferred using outdated boundaries, some of which were constructed in the late 1800s with the express purpose of excluding Africans from the land. The myth that South African farms are constructed on the basis of some kind of ideal, scientifically-established economic size must be dismissed. Although an Act repealing the 1970 Subdivision of Land Act has been passed, it has not been signed into law by the President. The 1970 Act determines the minimum size for farms based on income.
The Green Paper does attempt to tie land reform more closely to the new rural development programme, one strand of which is ‘strategic investments in social and economic infrastructure that will benefit entire rural communities’. If this signals a shift from support to individual farmers towards broader infrastructural support that can make smallholder farming a realistic option for the rural poor, it must be welcomed. But again, there is no further substance in the Green Paper. If the vision of state investment remains in the frame of the National Spatial Development Perspective, we can expect the continuation of investment decisions that force the rural poor to move from where they live, or to remain but expect limited public support.
The Green Paper makes a few very superficial proposals about land ownership. State land will be consolidated so that there is one system for land owned by national, provincial and municipal government. This land will remain under state ownership but will be leased out. This is not very different from what already happens. If any lessons have been drawn from practice in leasing state land to date, they are not shared in the Green Paper. For example, leases have often wound up with white commercial farmers or with relative elites among black producers.
Privately-owned land is divided into land owned by citizens and that owned by ‘foreigners’. The Green Paper proposes that regulatory limits may be imposed on private land, and gives examples such as land ceilings or sustainable use, but offers no details whatsoever about what specific limits are proposed. There may be room to make demands on what types of limitations should be imposed on privately-owned land. Foreigners will only be able to acquire land through leasehold and not through freehold title. This means they will only be able to lease land for long periods rather than own it outright. They will also be excluded from owning ‘sensitive or national security’ land, including coastal, communal, rural and agricultural land, amongst others. The Green Paper does not indicate whether multinational corporations are considered to be ‘foreigners’.
Communal tenure is a fourth ownership system which remains very poorly defined in law. The state remains the de facto owner of this land, despite efforts to transfer ownership to traditional authorities under the Communal Land Rights Act. This Act was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2010 for removing historical tenure rights of individuals and groups living in those areas. The Green Paper proposes dealing with this but provides no details of what approach it might take. It points out the need to consider governance arrangements between traditional authorities, local government and communal property institutions, but makes no concrete proposals.
The rest of the Green Paper outlines various new institutions to manage land and to conduct valuations. The proposals aim to tweak the existing system rather than fundamentally transform it. There are no proposals about how to affect a more rapid transfer of land from white to black, or how to overcome the weaknesses in policy that it noted at the outset. Ultimately the Green Paper is not actually about land reform at all, but about land management.
The ANC has drifted a long way away from the days of liberation struggle. Today it uses the state to manage the capitalist land market. Land reform has long ago dissolved into a bureaucratic exercise in containment. Its revival will require a return to the mass struggles that place the self-activity of the landless and land hungry at the centre of land transfer and agrarian transformation. The Green Paper offers not a glimpse of such a picture.
Stephen Greenberg is a researcher and an editor in the fields of agriculture, food, land and rural development, working extensively with research and environmental organisations.
