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The Limits to Land Reform: Rethinking 'the Land Question'

Literature › Works

Cherryl Walker (2005). The Limits to Land Reform: Rethinking 'the Land Question'. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 31, No. 4. Taylor & Francis (Routledge).
Type journal article
Scope Post-1994 South African economy
Method policy analysis
Period studied 1913–2005
Regions South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal (Eastern Shores, Lake St Lucia), former bantustans / communal areas, Northern Cape
Themes agriculture land, transition post apartheid, bantustans removals influx, politics ideology elections, demography urbanisation, inequality poverty unemployment
Citation key walker2005

Argument

Walker argues that there is a mismatch between the political aspirations and popular expectations attached to 'the land question' and what land reform can actually deliver. The national 'master narrative' of dispossession and restoration urges speed and hectare targets, whereas project-level implementation needs time, local knowledge and institution-building. She traces how a moderate, restitution-led and market-based programme emerged from the 1992-93 constitutional compromises, and shows that it has delivered modestly and been underfunded. She then identifies limits that do not stem from policy failure: demographic and urban shift, semi-arid ecology, rural people's reluctance to move far, and HIV/AIDS. She concludes that land reform should be reconceived as one element of a broader transformation that includes jobs, education, urban housing and health.

Evidence and method

Official statistics and presentations (Census of Commercial Agriculture 2002, Census 2001, DLA and CRLR reports and presentations, budget figures), policy documents (ANC RDP, 1991 White Paper, 1993 Charter proposals, World Bank 1993 report, Interim and 1996 Constitutions), NGO and land-activist papers (NLC, AFRA), the Ministerial Review of restitution (1998), secondary literature, interviews with negotiators (Camerer, Budlender, Claassens), and the author's own experience as Regional Land Claims Commissioner for KwaZulu-Natal (1995-2000), drawn on for the Bhangazi/Eastern Shores case study.

Findings

  • The 87/13 land divide, the foundation of the master narrative, comes with apartheid-era mass removals of over 3.5 million people. (p. 4)

    white settlers appropriated 87 per cent of the land for themselves and reserved a mere 13 per cent for the subjugated black majority.

  • The racial composition of commercial farming could in principle be transformed without substantially touching landlessness in the former bantustans. (p. 6)

    it is possible (theoretically, at least) to deracialise the commercial farming sector radically - i.e. in its entirety, by substituting 46,000 black for 46,000 white land owners

  • The commercial farm sector was shrinking in numbers by 2002. (p. 6)

    The 2002 Census of Commercial Agriculture enumerated 45,818 farm units, down from almost 61,000 units in 1996

  • The negotiated settlement confirmed the 87/13 divide symbolically and made restitution, not broader redistribution, the centrepiece of land reform. (p. 15)

    The constitutional negotiations thus confirmed the symbolic power of the 87/13 per cent land divide in the construction of the new South Africa, while eliding land reform with restitution.

  • The 30 per cent redistribution target adopted by the ANC originated in a World Bank projection. (p. 15)

    According to the Bank's calculations, it would cost the state R17.5 billion to transfer 30 per cent of agricultural land over five years - in this projection lies the origin of the 30 per cent target which the ANC subsequently adopted.

  • Land reform has been severely under-resourced relative to the Bank's own estimate. (p. 13)

    Between 1994 and 2004 the budgetary allocation to the DLA (including the CRLR) totalled some R7.3 billion - just over 40 per cent, in ten years, of what the World Bank had recommended should be allocated in five.

  • Restitution was initially swamped by claims, with very few settled by 1999, before an administrative route sped it up. (p. 14)

    By the time of the second national elections in 1999, some 63,500 claim forms were reported as lodged, of which only 41 had been processed to finality.

  • All three land reform programmes combined have transferred only a small share of commercial farmland to black beneficiaries. (p. 15)

    Combining the restitution, redistribution and tenure programmes gives a total of some 2.8 million hectares, or 3.4 per cent of commercial farmland, transferred to black beneficiaries between 1994 and mid-2005.

  • The former bantustans, home to about a third of the population, have been neglected by national economic policy and land reform. (p. 18)

    the former bantustans have remained essentially welfare, not economic, zones.

  • Demographic change means that South Africa is now predominantly urban, so rural land redistribution cannot be the main route to redress. (p. 18)

    The population of South Africa grew nine-fold during the twentieth century, from a little over 5 million in 1904 to just under 45 million in 2001.

  • Ecological constraints limit how much agricultural land can be redistributed productively. (p. 19)

    Only 13.5 per cent of the country's land is classified as arable, most of that located along the already densely settled eastern seaboard, including the former Transkei.

  • The land question should be answered through broader socioeconomic policy, not land alone. (p. 21)

    The answer to the land question must today be sought also in jobs, education, urban housing and a dramatic escalation in the provision of public health services to combat the scourge of AIDS.