The reinvention of land redistribution: three cycles of policy 1994-2012

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Ruth Hall (2012). The reinvention of land redistribution: three cycles of policy 1994-2012. Draft paper for 'Strategies to overcome poverty and inequality: Towards Carnegie III', University of Cape Town, 3-7 September 2012. Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape.

Type	conference paper
Scope	Post-1994 South African economy
Method	archival narrative
Period studied	1990–2012
Regions	South Africa, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape
Themes	agriculture land, transition post apartheid, politics ideology elections, inequality poverty unemployment, comparative theory, business and state
Citation key	hall2012

Argument

Hall argues that post-apartheid land redistribution was reinvented in three policy cycles (SLAG 1994-99, LRAD 2000-06, PLAS 2006-12). Each cycle broadly tracks the Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma presidencies and shifts in actor networks, interests and discourses. She argues that each cycle drew on the World Bank's market-assisted land reform model while claiming to break with the past, and that the pro-poor and anti-inequality objectives were discursively retained but largely abandoned. The paper challenges two conventional wisdoms: that policy was the product of consensual participation, and that the transition compromises were the main constraint. It traces policy through official documents, interviews and available data.

Evidence and method

Government policy documents (DLA, MALA, DRDLR, White Papers, Green Paper, Treasury estimates), donor reviews of the Land Reform Pilot Programme, World Bank papers, press reports, and the author's own elite interviews (2002-2006) and observations, drawn from her Oxford doctoral thesis. Official statistics on projects, households and hectares are presented in tables.

Findings

• Redistribution fell far short of the RDP's 30 percent target in the first five years. (p. 2)

  By 1999, less than one percent of commercial farmland had been made available to black South Africans; ten years after the advent of democracy, just three percent had been transferred

• LRAD replaced the pro-poor orientation with a commercial-farmer objective. (p. 2)

  which removed the pro-poor bias of land redistribution and introduced the new aim of establishing a class of black commercial farmers

• The SLAG grant was a single standardised subsidy pegged to the housing grant, limiting what land and support could be bought. (p. 12)

  the grant was set at a maximum of R15 000 'to be consistent with the level of the existing Housing Subsidy' and as an alternative to it

• A donor mid-term review warned that SLAG projects risked becoming new bantustans. (p. 12)

  the new 'communities' established through land reform will become no more than new bantustans, where people are dumped in settlements with no visible means of supporting themselves.

• SLAG delivered limited land to few households, with administration costs exceeding land costs. (p. 14-15)

  the administrative and other operational costs involved in implementing land reform projects far exceeded the capital cost of buying the land

• LRAD's new target of 200,000 households was a drastic reduction on the earlier target, so it scaled down while claiming to scale up. (p. 19)

  The proposed target of reaching 200 000 households was a radical reduction in the target of 600 000 households in the earlier period

• LRAD abandoned targeting the poor altogether. (p. 20)

  by removing the needs-based eligibility criterion it had done the opposite by abandoning the idea of targeting altogether

• The Land Bank's role in LRAD led to over-lending and farm repossessions, creating a debt trap. (p. 22)

  by lending too much to LRAD applicants, up to 60 percent to 70 percent of total costs, compared to standard practices of debt-equity ratios under one-third in the banking sector

• PLAS shifted to state purchase and leasing, with the promised second transfer of title not materialising. (p. 29)

  by 2011, he had clarified that the state would hold the land either in perpetuity or at least for a long period, and that leasehold would be the major form of tenure

• Under PLAS, spending is concentrated in fewer projects and per-person cost is high, and delivery is projected to fall. (p. 29-30)

  Averages for the period 2009 to 2012 were expenditure of R8 million per project (846 projects) and R652,000 per person (10,447 people)

• Land reform is not clearly resolving either agrarian question, and production discipline risks shifting the logic towards accumulation for the better-off. (p. 33)

  threatens to reorientate the whole logic of land reform away from redistribution and towards limited accumulation for the better-off