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Small scale/ holder Agriculture seminar

 
Agrarianisation or De-agrarianisation in the Eastern Cape? The implications for job
creation in the agricultural sector.

Introduction

Since the homeland era agriculture has been one of the key planks of livelihood for a
majority of rural people in the Eastern Cape. Agriculture development was widely supported
by the homeland administrations (Ciskei and Transkei) in an endevour to promote food
security at the local/household level as well as within its territories. An area such as
Willowvale in the Transkei was the hub of cropping and large quantities of maize were
produced in this area. The homeland administration used to provide tractors to till the land
and inputs such as seed were also distributed among the communal farmers. The marketing
of maize was organised in such a way that local stores or general dealers acted as market
places by which local farmers deposited their surplus for onward transmission to various
markets in Butterworth and beyond. Working on the fields was viewed by the locals as part
and parcel of their livelihood, it was not regarded as employment per se. Family members
who contributed to the farming activities were not paid a wage or salary but benefitted in
terms of food from crops such as maize (umqgushu), and non food items that were
purchased from cash generated from surplus maize sold. In other ways working on the
household fields was not a job as such but an obligation of each and every family member.
The post independent South Africa has also promoted agricultural development in the
former marginalised areas and even embarked on different agricultural projects
spearheaded by sector departments. For instance the department of social development
has supported a large number of agriculture and agriculture related projects throughout the
province under the banner; ‘Food Security projects’. Organisations such as Ruliv has
supported to a great extent wool production in the Willowvale area by providing grade rams
and shearing sheds. However research done by the Fort Hare Institute of Social and
Economic Research, (CLaRA, 2007; UNDP Human Development Index, 2008; 2009) found
that a majority of households had stopped farming the fields and where they were still
farming, cultivated in the gardens. There is no clear evidence on the decline of livestock
numbers as Anslie argued that by 2005, the livestock numbers were the same as those of
the 1930s. There are a number of reasons why de-agrarianisation is happening in the rural
Eastern Cape, chief among them is the flight of human capital to the urban centres leaving
the old aged and the sick in rural areas. The flight of human capital to the towns and cities
has been compounded by the lack of employment opportunities and income generating
related activities in rural areas. Farming has not been engrained in the way of life of the
youth of today and has been viewed as a job of elders and the uneducated. Numerous
grants given to rural households have also slowed down agricultural activity in communal
areas.
Agrarianisation drive and land reform
In 1994 the new government set to correct the legacy of apartheid which had a skewed land
ownership pattern in that a minority white population occupied most of the fertile and
productive land at the expense of the majority blacks. The Eastern Cape is, by most
indicators, the province with the highest incidence of poverty in South Africa; it has the
lowest mean monthly household expenditure, and forty-eight per cent of the population is
classified as living in poverty. Approximately ten million hectares of land (fifty-nine per cent
of the province) is in the hands of an estimated 6 500 commercial farmers, who employ
approximately 70 000 farm workers. This land is used (in descending order of area) for
sheep, beef cattle, mixed farming, dairy cattle and vegetable production (Bank and Minkley,
2005: 10). The rest of the land in the province, about five million hectares of it, is located in
the former Ciskei and Transkei homelands. Almost all of this land is communally owned and
has been held in trust by the state on behalf of its residents.
The challenge for the state has been to redistribute land to the previously marginalised
groups by embarking on nationwide land reform programme. The land reform programme
according to the then department of agriculture and land reform has three key elements,
namely land restitution, redistribution and tenure reform. Land restitution is a way of
returning back land to the original settlers/occupiers before 1913 and this exercise can be
argued had seen some tracks of land restored to the original occupiers. However in many
instances the original occupiers and their descendants settled for cash rather than the land.
Bank, 2003, Bank and Minkley, 2005, Bank and Mabhena, 2011), argue that most of the
restituted land in the Eastern Cape still belonged to the former commercial farmers since
communities settled for cash rather than the land itself. Furthermore the purchasing of the
land for both restitution and redistribution has been constrained nationally by the willing
seller, willing buyer model agreed on by the new government. Redistribution has moved at a
snail’s pace because of the high land prices demanded by the white commercial farmers and
the state’s target of distributing about 30% of commercial farming land to the blacks by
2014 is not attainable at this pace. For instance the department of Land Affairs has only
managed to purchase less than 10% of land for redistribution in the past 17 years. Tenure
reform has also been constrained by failure by the state and its apparatus to fully consult
the communal people in the drafting and enactment of the Communal Lands Right Act
(CLaRA, 2004) which was repealed by the constitutional court in 2010 (Bank and Mabhena,
2010). Although the act is now water under the bridge, the new Green Paper (2011) sets to
revive tenure reform although it is not yet clear how this will be carried out. In his recent
overview of the land reform in South Africa, Lahiff (2008) suggests that the main
beneficiaries of land and agricultural policy since democracy have been commercial farmers
and entrepreneurs. He states that: ‘a critical challenge for the land reform programme thus
remains the development of strategies that effectively target groups such as the landless,
the unemployed and farm workers, that contrite resources in areas of the greatest need and
promote solutions that meet the needs of poor and landless people” (2008: 40). Lahiff also
raises serious concerns about the capacity of the National Department of Land Affairs (DLA)
to effectively implement existing and new programmes. He notes that:
Central to the overhaul of policy must be reform of the institutions tasked to
implement such policy. Lack of skill and capacity, and inability to spend allocated
funds; have been repeatedly offered as reasons for underperformance by provincial
offices of the DLA and provincial departments of agriculture. Almost entirely missing
from the land reform scene has been local government, which has a vital role to play
in the provision of services and local economic development if land reform is to
achieve its objectives.
Du Toit (2009) supports Lahiff’s view by arguing that ‘policy instruments have been marked
by an increasing tendency to de-emphasis support for subsistence farming and to emphasise
the importance of commercial farmer support’ (2009: 20). He notes that there has been a
shift from earlier more poverty-focused initiatives, which subsidised the assistance of land
acquisition by poor and landless people, to ones which required that applicants had their
own savings and resources. The example cited is the Land and Agrarian Reform Programme
(LARP) which aims to transfer 5 million hectares to potentially successful medium sized
black farmers, in the hope of adding 10 000 black farmers to South Africa’s commercial
agricultural sector (cf. PLAAS 2008). Du Toit laments that: ‘billions of Rands will be spent on
establishing a small group of medium scale black farmers while the legacy of rural
landlessness, de-agrarianisation and politically charged histories will remain untouched’
(2009: 20).
Faced with the challenges of land reform, the state had to support agriculture in the
previous tribal areas by encouraging cooperative development. Cooperatives have been
widely supported in the agriculture sector, and with sound planning, management, including
constant monitoring and evaluation is a workable model that can create rural employment.
Rich (2011), an Eastern Cape analyst, comments that; “cooperatives are a fantastic model
for communal development; however, in the Eastern Cape context we lack crucial
ingredients: a strong cooperative culture, stronger work ethic, cooperative leadership that is
willing to endure personal sacrifice as opposed to personal enrichment.” The comments by
Rich are valid in a quest to generate employment in the rural sector. The argument here is
that despite the cooperative education the beneficiaries receive from various sector
departments, cooperatives have collapsed in large numbers. For instance successful
irrigation schemes such as Ncora and Shilow are good examples where the lack of a strong
cooperative culture and lack of a strong leadership contributed to the collapse of these
schemes. Furthermore cooperatives are faced with other challenges including lack of
‘critical capacity and the notion of get rich quickly before all is gone’. This mentality requires
a change in the mind set of co-operators and this applies also to Food Security projects. The
Eastern Cape today, 2011:3 acknowledges that among other things, most cooperatives have
failed to secure additional funding from the state and other agencies because of failure to
meet the set criteria for qualification. For instance out of 500 cooperatives in the province
only 80 qualified for support because they met the viability and sustainability criteria. The
agrarian drive is visible in the province, for instance recently the MEC for Social
Development commissioned the R1.4million Siyazama Mgudu Food Security project which
basically concentrates on maize, wheat and vegetable production. The emphasis to the
community in general and cooperative members in particular was the importance of
agricultural land as a livelihood base for households and the province, the role of
technocrats and politicians in securing markets for the produce, and the community’s role in
ensuring sustainability of the project.
How then can agriculture based employment be generated if entities like cooperatives are
not yielding the desired results? Is there an alternative model that can be adopted to
generate employment from agriculture? Who should lead the employment creation drive in
rural Eastern Cape? Can agriculture employment be generated outside the established
commercial farming system? Do rural people of the province really need agricultural
employment? These are some of the questions that we should ask ourselves as
development practitioners bearing in mind attitudinal complexities of beneficiaries.
One issue that is worth noting in the agrarianisation of the rural areas is that people tend to
view crop farming as the backbone of agriculture. They tend to neglect livestock production
as one of the agrarian livelihood pillars of the rural communities in the Eastern Cape. There
is a belief that ‘greening’ the rural landscape is a sign of increased agricultural production. I
argue that the livestock economy in this province is as important if not more important than
crop farming. It is imperative to support livestock production in the province bearing in
mind that livestock is not only a source of livelihood but also forms part of the social
economy. For instance Livestock is kept for ritual purposes and also to defray expenses in
cases of need.
De-agrarianisation problematic and job creation
Studies conducted by the Fort Hare Institute of Social and Economic Research from 2006 to
2009 indicate that local residents were more interested in having their own rights to land
endorsed than in securing those of the outer boundaries of their communities as
pronounced by the now scrapped CLaRA (2010). Beyond specific tenure issues particularly
the CLaRA, the study showed that de-agrarianisation had reached alarming levels in the
Eastern Cape with rural households intensely dependent on social grants for survival.
Development in rural areas was found to be hampered by the mismanagement of
development funds and by intense conflict and mistrust between traditional leaders and
local authorities. One of the most shocking findings of the 2007 survey was the very low
level of participation of households on communal land in agricultural production. Fewer
than two per cent of households in these areas said that they made living from farming
(Bank and Mabhena, 2011). There are complex debates about how, when and why deagrarianisation
occurred in the Eastern Cape, beginning with discussions of the 1913 Land
Act and its impact on rural communities. But it is generally agreed that the 1950s were
watershed years and that the rural revolts against Bantu authorities and betterment
planning in the region represented final gestures of resistance from the collapsing peasantry
to inevitable proletarianisation (Mbeki, 1964; Mayer, 1980; Delius, 1996; Beinart, 2008).
What happened after this is usually depicted as a steady and progressive decline into
poverty and cash dependence for rural households in the former Transkei and Ciskei
(Simkins, 1981). What is less well understood is how rapidly this decline occurred during the
homeland era and how much the absence of a rural development strategy after apartheid
has aggravated the situation.
There are conflicting reports on how different aspects of the agrarian system have
responded to change. Ainslie (2005), for example, argues that livestock numbers in the
communal areas of the Eastern Cape are today at similar levels to those of the 1930s and
that they have remained much more constant than the literature indicates, suggesting that
the linear decline thesis might need to be revisited, at least to accommodate drought and
variations in climate. On the crop production side, Andrews and Fox (2004) argue that the
critical shift from field production to reliance on household gardens coincided with the
growth of migrant labour in the apartheid years. But McAllister (2001) points out that the
abandonment of fields did not necessary mean reduced homestead output as gardens were
now expanded and used more intensively than fields. It seems possible to conclude that,
while less maize from the homestead sector reached the market during the homeland era,
the output of households might not have fallen quite as much as analysts predicted. In
trying to maintain rural production, tribal authorities and local agricultural officers played a
critical role in securing access to resources such as seed, dip, tractors and even fertilisers for
homesteads, through their networks into the homeland state and its agricultural services
(Gibbs, 2010). Access to this sort of support depended on the quality of local level social
relations, as well as the ability of chiefs and local officials to extract favours within local
patronage networks. Many chiefs still wanted to be respected by their people and did what
they could to ensure that they could maintain a role as patrons in their communities.
Since the end of apartheid, agricultural extension services have fallen away and the focus
has shifted to an urban-centred service delivery model where ‘the poor’, as a generic
category are seen to require the same basic services, namely square houses, on-site
domestic taps, flush toilets and electric lights. The modalities of rolling out these services
have also made development a largely technical affair which is less reliant on interaction
and participation from locals. Although the framework for service delivery stresses the need
for ‘civic engagement’ and citizen empowerment it is well known that sessions with
communities are infrequent and mainly focus on what they are being given rather than on
what they want or need (How involved are communities in the IDP process?). Most basic
services are delivered on a once off basis, in any case. In essence, it is a top-down model
that has been very largely focused on urban communities; even in rural municipalities most
of the delivery has gone into the small towns. By ignoring rural areas and the rurality of its
rural subjects, the ANC has greatly accelerated de-agrarianisation in the former Transkei and
other areas over the past fifteen years, perhaps doing more to undermine homestead
production than forty years of gruelling apartheid planning had done. Through the removal
of agricultural extension services, the disempowerment of tribal authorities as development
agencies, and relegation of the rural poor to a non-agrarian constituency, the Transkei
countryside has been urbanised in ways that are plain to see. RDP-style houses are popping
up everywhere as the rural economy flounders and households shift their focus from
production to a low level consumption lifestyle based on grants and on free land and
services.
This general change was clearly revealed in the CLaRA household survey, which found that
by 2007 forty per cent of households said that they had no access to land any more, while
fifty-two per cent claimed to have access to household gardens (usually less than half a
hectare in size) and twenty-four per cent said that they had access to a field (of, usually,
between one and three hectares). Of the twenty per cent of households that had access to
arable fields of between one and three hectares, fewer than five per cent used this land on
a regular basis. In most communal areas, unused fields were not generally reallocated to
other households which were able and willing to use them and traditional authorities did
not place pressure on households to ‘use their fields’ or ‘lose them’. Gardens were more
frequently used, and crops grown in gardens and fields were seldom sold on the market.
Production was for own consumption and sometimes for village level exchanges. In relation
to livestock, we found that about forty per cent of households still had access to cattle, and
slightly fewer had access to goats and sheep. The average number of beasts owned by cattle
owners was seven, but the majority of owners only held between one and four animals (the
high average was partially caused by urban entrepreneurs and businesspeople running large
herds in the location, although they no longer lived there permanently, and we noted that
this created severe pressure on communal grazing areas, Bank and Mabhena, 2011).
What does this mean to job creation in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape? What can be
done to attract more people to agriculture based employment? One issue worth noting in
trying to address job creation in these areas is that the demand for land hunger is low
because agriculture is viewed by most people as a social economy rather than a commercial
economy. The women and youth have migrated to urban centres in search of industrial jobs
and the likelihood of engaging in commercial agriculture is not certainity in the current
situation. The number of rural farm workers has drastically decreased in recent years as a
result of commercial farmers shifting away from labour intensive farming to non intensive
ventures like game ranching and tourism. This has seen farmers retrenching a lot of workers
just remaining with a few. In most of these farms the casualisation of labour has become the
norm and chances of most of these workers becoming a burden to the state’s fiscus in
future years is no secret bearing in mind that they would not have accumulated own
retirement pensions. In other ways the commercial farming sector is also contributing to deagrarianisation
as more and more land is no longer being used for agricultural purposes. So
is commercialisation of agriculture a vehicle of creating jobs in rural areas in contemporary
EC or other alternatives need to be developed? If they are developed which are those?
Cooperatives and other group related activities might salvage the situation if properly
planned and managed. For instance, in a 2009 study conducted by the author and
researchers from the Water Research Council (WRC), revealed that agriculture can
contribute to both subsistence and economic empowerment of organised agricultural
groups. The Chata irrigation scheme and household gardens in this area have contributed
about 61% of the household income of members of this community. One conclusion drawn
from this study is that if off-farm activities/employment contributes 39% of rural household
income in these areas there is a possibility that employment in the agricultural sector can be
realised if proper job creation plans are drawn in Local Municipalities. Planning at LM level
need to be coordinated and integrated in practice. The fact that LMs and sector
departments draw their own development plans encourages competition rather than
cooperation in development planning let alone service delivery. For instance the
department of Agriculture might be business minded in the use of land whereas the
department of land affairs might be social minded, meaning that its quest is to provide land
for social purposes (e.g. village settlements and addressing apartheid imbalances). The
department of Agriculture on the other hand might require land for commercial purposes
and this creates confusion and conflict among sector technocrats resulting in failure to
deliver to beneficiaries. Therefore it’s important for MIG and other grants that they should
incorporate agricultural based projects that would create employment even at local level
rather than placing more emphasis on urban based infrastructural projects alone.
Agricultural development is vital in a province like the EC because of its rich soil and not
forgetting its long history of contributing to the economy of the country through the export
of wool and other livestock related products over the years.
Conclusion
There are a lot of questions to be asked on whether the state really views agriculture as an
engine to economic growth. The fact that a lot of land in the communal areas lies fallow
suggests that a majority of rural dwellers have forsaken agriculture as a means of livelihood.
One argument that is often heard in the Eastern Cape is that agriculture production has
declined because state support in the form of pensions and grants has made ‘rural people
lazy’. This argument was recently articulated by Peter Mayende, former Land Claims
Commissioner for the Eastern Cape, in a paper presented to a conference on economic
development in the Eastern Cape. He argued that the current system of handouts was
unacceptable and unsustainable, and that the only feasible way forward was to create
thousands of small-scale farmers who would receive regular and consistent support from
the government to establish farming enterprises. Mayende claimed that such a policy might
lead to some rural displacement, but he felt that this would be necessary to reinvigorate
rural production. In his analysis, Du Toit (2009) suggests that one of the reasons for the
declining levels of self-reliance and agrarian production in the rural areas relates to the
subversive role played by large supermarkets and retail giants that distribute cheap food to
rural consumers and disincentivize local production. Du Toit (2009) argues that rural areas
are over-exposed to national chain stores and supermarkets, which had the tendency to
undermine and suppress all forms of local economic development. He suggests that ‘in
some ways metropolitan centres are both too close and too far: too far because of the
distance from job markets and too close because of the omnipresence of the giants of South
Africa’s corporate retail sector, which crowd out local entrepreneurship from all but the
least profitable sectors” (2009: 9).
Another common explanation for the steady decline in rural production is that outmigration
has diminished the capacity of households to produce crops. This has led most
able-bodied people moving to urban centres living rural areas with the old and sick.
Research shows that 64% of rural households have members away in search of employed
and better opportunities. The vast majority of those that are away now are young adults.
The evidence also suggests that there is an increasing tendency of long-term, permanent
outmigration from certain areas. In the period between the 1996 and the 2001, 35 000 rural
households left the Eastern Cape. This amounts to about 4% of the rural population. If this
trend is projected over a period of 20-30 years it is possible that there will be significant
depopulation, which will mean that more fields and gardens will lie fallow. The perspective
that I wish to add to this list of explanations is one which suggests that many rural
households are increasingly unable to farm because their members are too ill and their
resources too depleted by the business of tending to the sick and burying the dead. In South
Africa people ‘come home’ to die and this means that tens of thousands of sick people are
making the journey back into the rural areas from the cities every year. These people are a
burden rather than an asset to rural households, and they are certainly not in a position to
add meaningfully to an agrarian labour force.
However there is also likelihood that de-agrarianisation has been accelerated by the failure
of the new dispensation to provide sound policies on agricultural development. The fact
that the new National Development Plan 2030 pronounced by the Planning Commissioner in
2011 does not clearly put more emphasis on job creation based on agriculture is an
indication that agriculture has been given the prominence it deserves in the policy
framework. For instance the National Development Plan 2030, envisages to create 11
million jobs by 2030 through expanding the public works programme, lower the cost of
doing business and costs for households, help to match unemployed workers to jobs etc; it
does not clearly outline how jobs can be created in the agricultural sector except
emphasising the point that it will put money into irrigation in Makatini and Umzimvubu
River Basin. How will people who are not along these rivers going to benefit remains to be
seen. Again the issue of tenure security is critical for people to effectively utilise their
agricultural land for economic purposes. For example in the CLaRA study people interviewed
argued that the failure of the state to grant them secure tenure to the land they occupy
contributed to low interest in agriculture especially women who normally work the land.
The NDP 2030 nevertheless has acknowledged the importance of giving communal farmers,
especially women, security of tenure. If the new green paper on land reform is translated to
action there is a possibility that rural dwellers could engage in meaningful agricultural
development. Again it is important for the state to revitalise the extension services in these
rural areas to educate the youths in particular to understand that employment can be
generated from farming as it can be generated in industries. One chief argued that, “the
youth need to be taught about agriculture and farming and to involve themselves in such
projects as food security projects rather than spend their time drinking beer’. This is an
important point because industries alone cannot absorb all the out of school youth and
hence the need to re-think agriculture as a vehicle of job creation in the EC.

References
Bank, L. 2001 Maize Production in Willowvale, Development Research Report, GTZ South Africa.
Bank L, etal (ed) 2006 The Rapid Assessment of Service Delivery and Socio-economic Trends in the
Eastern Cape. Eastern Cape Government
Bank, L & Minkley, G 2005 ‘Going Nowhere Slowly: Land Livelihoods and Rural Development in the Eastern
Cape’, Social Dynamics, 12, 1-20.
Delius, P. 1996. A Lion Amongst the Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal.
Johannesburg: Ravan.
Du Toit, A. 2009 ‘Adverse Incorporation and Agrarian Policy in South Africa’, unpublished conference paper.
ECSECC (Eastern Cape Socio-Economic Consultative Council), 2000, Rural Development Framework. Draft
document.
McAllister, P. 2001. Building the Homestead: Agriculture, Labour and Beer in South Africa’s Transkei.
Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
Mabhena, C. and Bank, l. (2011): Bring back Kaiser Matanzima? Communal land, traditional
leaders and politics of nostalgia, in Daniel, J. Naidoo, P. Pillay, D and Southall, R. New South
African Review, New Paths, Old Compromises. Johannesburg. Wits University Press.
The Eastern Cape Today, 23 October, 2011

To find out more about the seminar go to the Afesis website:
http://www.afesis.org.za/Seminar-Information/mall-scaleholder-agriculture