2,317 research outputs found
The impact of land restitution and land reform on livelihoods
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.Belgian Technical Cooperation (BTC
Revisiting unresolved questions: land, food and agriculture
This article explores three articles from the perspective of 2011. They are Makhosazane Gcabashe and Alan Mabin’s ‘Preparing to negotiate
the land question’ (Transformation 11), Tom Bennett’s ‘Human rights and
the African cultural tradition’ (Transformation 22) and Henry Bernstein’s
‘Food security in a democratic South Africa’ (Transformation 24).
The author focuses on four themes: the politics of negotiations; the location of ‘rights’
in land and to custom; the political economy of agrarian change; and the
multiple facets of the ‘land question’. In conclusion, it draws attention to
enduring questions about how to confront agrarian dualism, dynamics of
changing and deepening inequality in the countryside, tensions between
the logic underpinning land and agricultural policies, and the need to recast
agrarian change in a wider frame, in recognition of the profound ways in
which what happens in South Africa’s rural areas are part of regional and
global dynamics.International Bibliography of Social Science
A fresh start for rural development and agrarian reform?
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
The legacies of the Natives Land Act of 1913
Looking back at the century since the promulgation of the Natives Land Act, it can be argued that it shaped the trajectories of most South Africans’ lives. It expelled black people from the land into crowded reserves and formed the cornerstone of the migrant labour system and through which, accumulation of wealth in white-owned mines, farms and factories. Far from unravelling this history of dispossession, the land reform process has merely dabbled at its edges while the inequalities it set in place have in some ways been further aggravated since 1994. Four legacies of the Act are identified: the material legacy of poverty and inequality in the divided countryside but also the displaced legacy of urban poverty and inequality; the social and spiritual legacy of division, invisibility and failed reconciliation; and a political legacy of legal pluralism and dualistic governance that denotes zones of tradition or custom, distinct from the rest of the country. In this context, the church needs to reflect not only on its mixed involvement in dispossession and resistance to it in the past, but also on its role in dismantling the structures of poverty and inequality, social and spiritual division, invisibility, and dualistic governance.Department of HE and Training approved lis
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