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Article Excerpt
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Of all of the cases of unequal land distribution in the world, South Africa is easily one of the starkest examples of inequity relative to population. The statistics on apartheid-era land concentration are widely known as a result of antiapartheid campaigns: 71 percent of the population is confined to roughly 13 percent of the country's total land area (Borras 2003, 384). This lopsided distribution resulted not only from the policies of the Afrikaaner-led nationalist government (1948-1994) but also from centuries of land alienation in favor of white settlers (see, for example, Bundy 1979).
In 1994 the first democratically elected government, led by the African National Congress (ANC), promised fundamental change and announced a goal of redistributing 30 percent of white-controlled agricultural land to the majority black population by 1999 (ANC 1994, 22). Although it enunciated laudable goals, the first attempt at land reform (1994-1999) produced disappointing results. By 2000 little land had actually changed hands, and observers noted that redress proceeded very slowly (Turner and Ibsen 2000). Critics from the left challenged the market-based redistribution mechanism, and those from the right argued that the new black landowners either underutilized or mismanaged their land.
In 1999, under intense pressure from all parties, Thoko Didiza, minister of agriculture and land affairs in the administration of then newly elected President Thabo Mbeki, announced a moratorium on all land-redistribution projects until the government could formulate new guidelines that would both accelerate land redistribution and stay within a market-oriented approach. The department revised its land-reform policy, moving away from a model of land redistribution to alleviate poverty toward one aimed at promoting a class of black commercial farmers. The major vehicle for this effort was the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) program, which had largely replaced the Settlement / Land Acquisition Grant (SLAG) by late 2000.
In this article we document and analyze the impact of both of these land-redistribution programs in South Africa's Limpopo and Western Cape Provinces. By examining a cross-section of projects we attempt to explain why land redistribution in the two provinces has not fulfilled the overall programmatic goals of broader land-reform policy. We further develop a political ecology of blocked land-reform possibilities to theorize why progress has been so limited to date.
POLITICAL ECOLOGIES OF LAND REFORM
Researchers who employ a political ecology approach to studying human-environment interactions continually demonstrate its flexibility as an analytical framework. We hesitate to describe political ecology as a theory, or even as a coherent and singular concept. For instance, although reviews of political ecology have become prolific and refined (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Blaikie 1999; Zimmerer and Bassett 2003; Moseley and Logan 2004; Peet and Watts 2004; Robbins 2004), debate continues over its definition and practice. Some authors focus on politics and economics (Peet and Watts 2004; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Bassett 2004); others emphasize ecology (Zimmerer and Bassett 2003; Vasquez-Leon and Liverman 2004). Most political ecologists, however, generally agree that this field "combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy" (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, 17).
We wish to avoid "black boxing" change; that is, simply extolling political ecology as a framework that explains everything--and therefore nothing. For us, three key concepts help frame the political ecologies of land reform: discourse, marginalization, and structure/agency. Poststructural political ecologists focus on the power of discourse, and environmental narratives more specifically, to shape environmental policies and programs (Leach and Mearns 1996; Bassett and Koli Bi 2000; Moseley and Laris 2008). Discourse also shapes perceptions and imaginaries of land reform.(1) Competing discourses in South Africa vie for hegemony in policy and often produce conflicting narratives of the progress, pace, and benefits of the reform process (McCusker 2008).
Many political ecologists examine marginalization as an economic, social, and environmental process (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). All of the land-redistribution projects reviewed in this article involve people with a history of marginalization; more specifically, those who have had access to little or no land, capital, or logistical or educational resources. In both provinces, most beneficiaries were not trained until after their project had begun. Additionally, these beneficaries are poor and often live in marginal environments--especially in Limpopo Province--with little other than labor to contribute to projects. Many of the projects also involve the transfer of economically and environmentally marginal land.
Attention to structure and agency is another hallmark of political ecology. Early political ecologists tended to emphasize the power of broad political economic forces--colonialism, capitalism, or trade, for example--as drivers of environmental degradation (Watts 1983; Blaikie 1985). Current political-ecological studies pay attention to the agency of local actors as active participants in the construction of their socioecological realities (Bassett 2001). Structure and agency also play an important role in land-reform policy and practice. Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984), we argue that agency and structure must be examined together in order to fully map the interaction between the state and the economy (structures) and project beneficiaries (agents) in their struggles to produce reformed landscapes.
To realize our conceptual framework we borrow a concept from David Harvey's influential Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996), on the mutual constitution of "social-ecological and political economic processes" (p. 6). In theorizing about the "locus of change," Harvey argued that "the presumption from a dialectical/process-based and historical materialist view of the world is that it is not change per se that has to be explained, but the forces that hold down change and/or which give it a certain directionality" (p. 105; italics in the original). Academic researchers often examine cases of demonstrable change in an attempt to uncover driving forces and reduce such forces across case studies to a set of common causes of change. In this article we attempt to observe and explain the processes whereby change is restricted or blocked. For us, this is as critical to understanding the political ecologies of land reform in South Africa as examining areas of change is.
SOUTH AFRICAN LAND POLICY, 1994-2006
Land reform emerged from the period of democratic transition with three planks to address the differing circumstances inherited from the apartheid and colonial eras. The first plank, land restitution, emphasizes compensation for land that prior governments illegally or improperly seized from the black population after the passage of the 1913 Natives Land Act. Land-tenure reform, the second plank, addresses tenure issues in communal areas, which include large parts of the former Bantustans, or homelands. Designed to facilitate the transfer of land from white communities to black ones through a willing buyer-willing seller, market-based approach, land redistribution is the third plank of reform and the...
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