South African president's land reform proposal widely criticized

South African president Jacob Zuma has recently proposed new ideas to transfer more land from the country's white minority to its black majority.

He proposes localizing land reform to district level, and suggests giving white commercial farmers "the option of assisting (land) transfer to black farmers."

The president's proposal has been met with widespread derision, with one critic dubbing it 'ill disciplined.'.

African Agriculture

South African land reform: more attention paid to supporting new farmers

Land reform in South Africa is far deeper than just an agricultural issue, but making viable commercial farmers out of land recipients is vital. But it is far from easy necessarily quick.

In recent years focus has been shifting from simply evaluating the success or failure of the reform effort based on how much land has been transferred from ‘old’ white farmers to ‘new’ black farmers. The historical-political-racial aspects of current land distribution patterns and how to change them were the main focus of the early post-apartheid land reform efforts. There was relatively little attention paid to how well the new recipients of land would economically fare for themselves and for the country.

South Africa has learned expensive lessons from that early land reform experience. There is increasing awareness of the need to accompany any land transfers with appropriate agricultural support for the new farmers, as this article explains.

African Agriculture

Zimbabwe: who grabbed what land from whom?

Chido Makunike

An astonishing paradigm shift about Zimbabwe's complicated land issue and its much pilloried land reform exercise is slowly beginning to take place in some western circles. One of the most startling turns was the July 20 2012 New York Times article, 'In Zimbabwe Land Takeover, a Golden Lining.'

It was startling because it is rare for a conventional western news outlet, let alone one with the prestige and influence of the New York Times, to look at Zimbabwe's land reform as anything other than 'brutal dictator Robert Mugabe's land grab from innocent, productive white farmers to his corrupt, can't-farm black cronies.'

Since the controversial, messy, often violent Zimbabwean land reform began in 2000, the western narrative of it has rarely strayed from that simple, black/white, good/evil summation.

The NYTime's Lydia Polgreen stunned supporters and opponents of the land reform alike in looking at it from nuanced, non-political Zimbabwean perspectives almost never featured in western media. Certainly there has been a lot of favoritism towards the politically well-connected in the parceling out of land since the farm takeovers, but few in the West have wanted to hear that most of the beneficiary 'new farmers' can hardly be described as 'Mugabe's cronies.' 

Polgreeen based much of her article on how as controversial, messy and problem-plagued as the land redistribution exercise has been, it has also changed the fortunes, prospects and self-regard of hundreds of thousands of black Zimbabweans.

In a comment reflective of the thinking of many Zimbabweans, even those opposed to Mugabe on other issues, in reaction to the land-holding patterns the country found itself with at independence in 1980, Polgreen quotes one new farmer asking rhetorically, "Why should one white man have all this?" he asked, sweeping an arm across the lush, rolling farmland around his fields. "This is Zimbabwe. Black people must come first."

Polgreen also touches on the huge cost to white landholders at which the land reform has been done.

"Now that we are down to less than 200 hectares, there isn’t enough income to support everyone,” said one white farmer to Polgreen, who she said asked not to be identified because he feared seizure of even more land if he spoke out.

This brings out an irony about that last farmer's comment. Much of the long-festering black angst about land, and one of the reasons Mugabe is a hero to many black Africans while being such a monster in the West, is that colonial conquest brought to Africans a similar kind of dispossession to that which the white farmer speaks about.

Charles Taff, president of the once farming-dominant Commercial Farmers Union that represents the remaining white farmers, says, in response to the black gains in tobacco farming, "The tragedy with tobacco is that expansion, if they had the right policies, could have been done in the 1990s in conjunction with the commercial (i.e. white farmers) sector."

Polgreen closes her article with a comment from a land reform researcher whose take is that 'judging the success of land reform by looking at production figures misses a crucial point.'

He says, "No one ever argued that this is a more productive form of farming. But does it share wealth more equitably? Does it give people a sense of dignity and ownership? Those things have value, too."

Predictably, there was a firestorm of reaction to Polgreen's article, much of it outraged at a perceived white-washing of 'Mugabe's land grab.' The New York Times, perhaps in an effort to defend itself for going against the grain of the accepted western thinking on Zimbabwe, felt moved to follow up the article a few days later with a question and answer session between Polgreen and readers.

A day after her article was published, Polgreen twittered, "I'll be taking questions about Zimbabwe's land grab legacy." She didn't spell out whether by 'land grab legacy' she meant the colonial grab from the Africans, or whether she meant the more recent 'Mugabe's land grab.'

Largely in the western media, the latter is considered a terrible wrong against the rule of law and property rights, the former as a long-ago accident of history that is best forgiven and forgotten. Obviously there is a large body of opinion in Zimbabwe and in much of the non-western world that sees the situation differently. What was so shocking about the NYTimes feature was their giving the time of day to these usually unheard non-western perspectives.

 If there are winners in Zimbabwe's land reform, there are also losers, the white farmers being the most obvious example. Although not a major thrust of her article, many previous articles have pointed out that many of the labourers who were employed on previously white-owned farms have become destitute. As a group they may have been experienced farm hands, but were even less equipped than many others to become viable small-scale farmers in their own right.

Then of course there was the major economic hit which the country took as a result of the disruption in its agriculture, which was the base for many other parts of the economy. In that regard it could be said there was no Zimbabwean who remained unaffected by the manner of 'Mugabe's land grab/reform.'  

Most Zimbabweans have moved on to how the wrongs and mistakes of the land reform can now be corrected without the wholesale reversal to the previous status quo that many of the white farmers may have hoped for in the early days. The 'collapsed' Zimbabwe that is still described in much of the western media, much of which finds itself unable to see beyond Mugabe's treatment of white farmers, is fading into distant memory as people grapple with how to get ahead in a still tough economy. Many problems remain and will do so for a long time, but whether the hardships in Zimbabwe are any more than those in many other parts of the world where people get on the best way they can under their circumstances is doubtful.

Certainly Zimbabwe is in many ways a very different country from what it was in 2000. After the 10 year land reform-linked economic crisis that began to lift in about the year 2009, many who were middle class are poorer. But as Polgreen's article tries to show, many who were more or less locked into being low wage workers at the bottom of the economy now have opportunities for self-improvement (based on access to land) they could never have dreamed of before, even with with the difficulties of accessing credit and learning farming on the job. It's a situation of six of one, half a dozen of the other. 

Cathy Buckle is a white Zimbabwean who had her farm expropriated in 'Mugabe's land grab/reform.' She writes regularly about her perspective of how the country is faring.

For historical reasons, their place in society and how they wielded their economic power at the peak of their dominance, there is not very much empathy for the dispossessed white farmers in Zimbabwe. But if there is widespread support for land reform on the basis that white landholding dominance was established on colonially grabbed land, Buckle represents a subset of white farmer who did not neatly fit the colonial land grabber's descendent's stereotype.

As she explains, "I am a Zimbabwean with white skin. I was born, raised, educated and am permanently resident here. For the last twelve years I have been without constitutional rights because I am a white Zimbabwean who also became a farmer a decade after Independence."

"The farm was not an inherited family property, but was purchased on the open market in 1990, ten years after Independence, with the approval of the Zimbabwe government and their Certificate of No Interest. No compensation has been paid for this farm or any of the buildings and improvements on it since it was grabbed."

White farmers who fit into Buckle's category have a special reason to feel aggrieved at their dispossession, and for being lumped into the broad category of 'inheritors of stolen African land.' Naturally and understandably, Buckle is more consumed with her personal injustice than she is interested in the genesis of the whole race-based contestation for land going back a century ago, when the first colonial land grabs began in earnest.

If you're going to talk about 'land grabs' in Zimbabwe, you have to specify which grab you're referring to. There have been several grabs and counter-grabs, and which one seems more justifiable than the other does not depend on any widely agreed sense of what is 'right' or 'just,' but may depend more on who you are.

Who grabbed what land from whom? Whose sense of being wronged and of seeking justice should have the upper hand? Why? 

It's messy, it's complicated. The New York Times stunned many by being bold enough to split from the rest of the western media herd to begin to look at the issue of land in Zimbabwe in its full complexity, causing many of its outraged readers to bust some blood vessels in the process.

If little Zimbabwe's land issues could cause so much heated, emotional reactions amongst the readers of a newspaper all the way in northern America, imagine the gnashing of teeth that will come if and when South Africa's historically similar and also deeply racially charged land issue blows up as pressures build up in that country. The troubles in Zimbabwe and their reverberations, as seen by the spicy reader reactions to Polgreen's New York Times article, will then seem like a mere picnic.  

African Agriculture

Why radical, Zimbabwe-style land reform is appealing to some in South Africa

Chido Makunike

The on-going discussion about land reform in South Africa is fascinating to watch. South Africans generally hate to have any parallels drawn between their process and that in their smaller northern neighbor Zimbabwe. But because the historical events and the pressing current imperatives for land reform in the two countries are so similar, the ghost of Zimbabwe inevitably, unavoidably looms large in the shrill, emotional debate.

The prevailing South African orthodoxy about the Zimbabwean government's 'grab' of land from white farmers, as part of correcting the earlier grabs of land from Africans by colonial governments, is that it is a lesson on what South Africa should not do. Not only is this the strongly expressed view by the anxious commercial farmers who are resigned to some kind of change coming, the government has also been at pains to insist that no Zimbabwe-style 'grabs' without compensation are being contemplated.

However, there are some sections of South African society who look at the same picture of the Zimbabwe 'grabs,' along with their agricultural and economic consequences, but come to a different conclusion from the prevailing orthodoxy.

Roughly, that conclusion is that the white farmers in Zimbabwe/South Africa were/are such an economically entrenched and strong group, and that they are also so utterly racist and against change that only radical measures can begin the process of transformation towards a less obviously racialized distribution of land, which everybody says they recognize is a trigger for trouble in the future. According to this view, land reform in South Africa/Zimbabwe has/had to be revolutionary, rather than gentle and evolutionary. And, the argument goes, a revolution is by necessity painful, with the work of getting back to a new, post-revolution
'normal' being long and difficult.

The youth league of the ruling African National Congress (ANCYL) are young hotheads dissatisfied with the
pace and nature of post apartheid/post-1994 change in South Africa. They are also not shy to express their impatience, and their contempt for the senior leadership of their party, who they believe to have 'sold out' and abandoned spearheading the aspirations of the black majority. The ANC Youth League are considered an influential force amongst young South Africans voters, so while the party leadership may be discomforted by its criticisms, it is not an easy matter to shut them up.

For many, the main proof of how ill-advised the recent Zimbabwean land grabs were as a way of correcting
the colonial land grabs of the last century, is 'land reform may have been necessary, but look at how that
country has now gone from regional breadbasket to basket case.' Therefore, 'Mugabe's land grabs' were a disaster and cannot possibly serve as a model for South Africa's even more messy and complicated
historical land issues, the argument goes.

The counterpoint to this, shared by some of the ANCYL's leading hotheads, is that expecting painless land reform is a pipe dream given the entrenched economic interests and holdover apartheid racial attitudes. When they look at Zimbabwe, they acknowledge the wrenching pain of that country's radical mode of land reform, but see that as simply another necessary phase of the long 'struggle' for post-colonial, post-apartheid self assertion.

It is not much use to argue against this view with agricultural and economic data. It is deeply and primarily a political argument, with land reform simply the most attention-grabbing conduit of an issue used by the ANCYL to make the argument. In some ways, the voices for radical land reform and those cautioning for a more 'responsible' land reform might as well be talking in two completely different languages.

'Okay then, if we suppose your crazy analysis of the situation is correct, how do the pro-radical land reform advocates, like those in the ANCYL, excuse the agricultural and economic decline that ensued in
Zimbabwe as a result of its chosen method of land reform? Explain that if you think you're so clever, you bloody, obviously Mugabe apologist.'

They don't excuse it. They simply regard it as having been unavoidable because of the perceived resistance
to any genuine reform, particularly any that caused even the slightest discomfort for the direct or
indirect beneficiaries of the colonial-era land grabs from Africans. The explanation is that the (black) Zimbabweans may undergo a period of hardship as they build a new system of land tenure and agriculture,
but at least they are the drivers of their own reform process now, in a way black South Africans are not yet seen to be by some in the ANCYL. The charge of the hotheads against their leaders is that they have got so comfortable with power and its perks that they have lost the steam to spearhead real change.

When an ANCYL leader said a few weeks ago that Zimbabwe-style 'land grabs' may be necessary and even desirable in South Africa, it was almost certainly not with any expectation that this was a suggestion
that would be widely warmly received. He was probably trying to use this extremely sensitive, emotive issue to provoke and shake people up, which he predictably succeeded in doing. Just as predictably, there was a torrent of condemnation from white farmers' representatives, most of the dominant media and other sectors.

Also predictably, a senior ruling party official had to come out and issue a statement calming frayed nerves by assuring all and sundry that the ANC government had no plans to grab land from anybody. ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe dutifully said, “It is not the ANC policy to expropriate land without compensation and personally I don’t think it will work.”

That's fairly clear cut, but it was also striking how he acknowledged the appeal for some of the stance of the young hotheads of his party by saying, “It will not be helpful to engage in violent polemics with the ANC Youth League in the run-up to the ANC policy conference (December 2012). The conference will address land reform in detail.”

Mantashe was careful to dissociate party and government policy from 'land grabs,' but interestingly, he was just as careful to step very gingerly in how he repudiated the explosive youth league leader's statement.

Clearly, this is partly in recognition of the general build up of the perception by some (many?) black South Africans of (1) how little things have changed for them since the end of apartheid and (2) how little group power relations have changed, except for the new black elite having joined 'the good life.'

South Africa and Zimbabwe may both have similarly racialized land issues, but they are very different countries in many ways. It is important to avoid reading too much into the two countries' similarities. However, it is fascinating to see how so far, the progression of the land reform debate in South Africa is very similar to that in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, before 'Mugabe's land grabs' started in earnest in 2000.

Up until then, the same 'international media' that today portrays Mugabe as a supernaturally evil ogre lauded his government for its perceived don't-rock-the-boat moderation and adherence to economic orthodoxy. It was a 'responsible government' then, very much like today's ANC government in South Africa is considered to be and praised/flattered for. But at home, there grew an increasing estrangement over post-independence (1980) 'transformation' between the rulers and many of the ruled, as is happening in South Africa today.

As late as 1995, or perhaps even later, Mugabe's government probably intended to continue with its 'no land grabs' policy. The white farmers who had feared Mugabe's accession to power in 1980 were obviously pleasantly surprised and very relieved that contrary to their fears, there seemed no plans for significant changes in the colonial-era land holding pattern. If anything, they continued to thrive as the 'responsible' new government carried on with various strong support schemes to the farmers, entrenching the country's 'breadbasket' status. All was right with the world.

The white farmers carried on pretty much as before and Mugabe was feted around the world for being the conciliatory Nelson Mandela of his time, when the real Nelson Mandela was then still holed up in an apartheid jail.

But things were not necessarily 'right' for everybody. Beneath the surface gloss of the 'breadbasket' under the then 'responsible' Mugabe government were many old historical, racial, political and economic sores that continued to fester, as well as new complaints added to the mix. Like the South Africa of today.

In the end, the infamous 'Mugabe land grab' did not so much begin because of a deliberate, thought-out policy to reverse the 'responsible' economic, land and agricultural policies of the previous two decades and before. It was arguably more a panicked, opportunistic, populist reaction to long-bubbling social, economic and therefore also political pressures that suddenly burst to the surface, forcing the government's hand towards something radical to appease the volcano.

South African society faces very much similar pressures, with decades and centuries-long feelings about previous land grabs providing a powerful conduit for articulating deep old and new grievances.

How is it all going to work out in South Africa?

It would be foolish to pretend to have a crystal ball into the issue, but in countries with particularly explosive land issues like South Africa and Zimbabwe, what governing politicians wish for, say or don't say may not be the most reliable indicator of what the future holds. If and when the volcano erupts, it is anybody's guess how the politicians will try to prevent the lava from burning them. Being flattered as 'moderate and responsible' by distant media and interest groups may mean nothing when local pressures threaten your very hold on power.

Let's watch and see how things develop in South Africa.

African Agriculture

South Africa's ruling party's youth league threatens Zimbabwe-style 'land re-grabs'

If you want to cause shock, anger, loathing and trepidation to South Africa's commercial farmers, just say the words 'Zimbabwe land reform.' You will get an emotional earful about it.

South Africa is eager to reassure its farmers and everybody else that it will not go the way of  'brutal-dictator-Mugabe's-land-grab-from-white-farmers-to-his-cronies-which-turned-Zimbabwe-from-regional-breadbasket-to-basket case.'

But the young hotheads in the Youth League of South Africa's ruling Africa National Congress have nevertheless caused a lot of consternation by sometimes expressing admiration for Zimbabwe's controversial land reform, in which land was 'grabbed' without compensation from white farmers. One of several big elephants in the room about land in southern Africa is that it most often ended up in the white farmers hands by virtue of convoluted colonial land grabs from Africans, setting up in motion the present desirability for re-grabs amongst people like the ANCYL, for whom change in favor of the black majority since the end of apartheid in 1994 has been too slow.

ANCYL deputy president Ronald Lamola said, "It was only after a forceful mass action by the people of Zimbabwe that Zanu PF (Robert Mugabe's party) ended up owning up to that role.... It looks like we are going to have that here.”

Lamola said it was expected that white South Africans and investors would flee the country when "militant and aggressive" legislation was implemented. "When the land grab process was starting in Zimbabwe, people ran away," he said. "They are going to leave."

Lamola said that when economic transformation took place in South Africa, some people would experience pain.

National Union of Metalworkers of SA general secretary Irvin Jim said the biggest mistake ever made after the 1994 elections was section 25 of the Constitution (property rights). He said it had served only to protect the wealth of the whites. "Those who control the economy are seriously protected by that section," he said.

He said white capitalists were now relaxed and happy after the expulsion from the ANC of former ANCYL president Julius Malema. "Who is celebrating [Malema's expulsion]? The white people who own this
country," he said.

The immediate controversy around the land reform/land grab (take your pick according to your bias) in Zimbabwe has died down, though still leaving the hard question of how to build a new system of commercial agriculture. Because the apartheid-era repression in South Africa was longer and far more vicious than that experienced in colonial Rhodesia, South Africa currently sits on a much bigger potential powder keg of unresolved land issues than Zimbabwe did/does.

Hopefully South Africa can somehow resolve them without an explosion.

African Agriculture

South Africa to support struggling land reform farms

South Africa’s land reform effort has been criticized for its heavy focus on simple ‘restitution’ of land expropriated from its black citizens during apartheid. There has been much less attention paid to ensuring that the beneficiaries are then assisted to be viable commercial farmers, as previous governments did for white farmers.

There are targets for how much land should be ‘restituted’ to black South African by a certain period, but no targets for what the new farmers should be able to achieve in a given number of years. Historical, racial, cultural and other aspects of the country’s currently lopsided land distribution patterns are partly addressed, but without also taking into account the commercial viability of ‘new’ farmers or the agricultural productivity of the economy.

Without technical and financial support, many land reform farms have gone broke. In 2011 a parliamentary committee revealed that black farmers had resold almost two million of the six million hectares of farm land bought for them by the government; often back to the previous owners.

There are now modest efforts to go beyond simply re-distributing land, to also giving some of the new landholders to be viable farmers. As part of this, the government has announced a R28 million facility “to restructure and fund 13 unproductive land reform farms in the North West province.”

It is the first disbursement by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform under a new strategy called Recapitalization and Development Programme.

A spokesman said, "The department has committed itself to recapitalize more than 1,000 deserted and unproductive farms nationally. A farm will be funded under close supervision of the department in order to ensure sustainability.”

‘Strategic partners’ had been selected within the commercial farming community to ensure the success of the programme.

The strict racial regimentation of apartheid that led to laws leading to mass land expropriation from blacks to whites means that land reform is a pressing but touchy issue for South Africa. Long after the formal end of apartheid in 1994, there is still debate but relatively little action about how to addresses the injustices of the past while also ensuring that the exercise does not only address sentimental issues, but agricultural and economic ones as well.

South Africa’s ever-present land reform debate has recently become feverish after a white deputy minister said blacks had no historical claim on up to 40% of the country’s land mass, and could not allege dispossession of it by whites. On the other extreme are South African blacks who are offended by the very idea of apartheid-expropriated land needing to be ‘bought back’ by the government.

African Agriculture

Land reform clash between South African president, minister mirrors stark racial differences on the issue

South Africa’s long-festering land reform issue received a jolt when the president and one of his deputy ministers publicly expressed their very different perspectives on the origins of the land imbalance and the way to resolve it.

The commonly stated figures are that black South Africans who constitute 87% of the population hold 13% of the land, while whites who are less than 10% hold 87%. Land dispossessions from black Africans and segregationist laws during the pre-1994 period of apartheid were to be initially dealt with by a government plan for 30% of land to be ‘restituted’ to blacks by 2013. The government says only 8% has been so restituted

All the figures are hotly disputed by some, but there is widespread agreement that land reform is unavoidable. Amongst the most heated issues is how best to achieve it.

President Jacob Zuma said the "willing buyer-willing seller option has not been the best way to address the land restitution question." That greatly alarmed his deputy minister of agriculture, Pieter Mulder, who is also vice president of the Freedom Front party, whose members are predominantly ‘conservative’ Afrikaners, the group which ruled the country during apartheid.

Mulder responded to Zuma, “The problem does not lie with the willing - buyer willing - seller principle. The problem is the disastrous way in which land redistribution has been implemented in the past 18 years.”

What particularly riled Mulder and his constituency was the perception that Zuma’s statement that a voluntary, free-market process had failed to address the issue “means that the government believes in the nationalization of agricultural land.”

There was the unusual, politically titillating sight of a deputy minister engaged in high profile, public disagreement with the president who appointed him to his position. However, South Africa being an open, democratic country, that seemed to be largely taken in stride by all.

But what really caused an uproar was Mulder then going on to state that, “There is sufficient proof that there were no Bantu-speaking people in the Western Cape and North-western Cape (provinces). These parts form 40% of South Africa's land surface. Africans in particular never in the past lived in the whole of South Africa. The Bantu- speaking people moved from the equator down while the white people moved from the Cape up to meet each other at the Kei River. I seriously differ with the statement that white people had stolen their land.”

On that, all hell broke loose. The debate between the two men swiftly became a shouting match of competing historical narratives on all sorts of fora, with the principal dividing line being whether the debater was black or white.

Mulder has been called all sorts of names, with many black groups calling on the president to fire his deputy minister. In a fascinating replay of the progression of the same debate in Zimbabwe 10 to 15 years ago, some took Mulder’s stance as proof that white South Africans would never voluntarily participate in any meaningful land reform except on their own terms, and that his comments proved that what he most fears, expropriation, was the best and only course available.

The president himself was a lot more measured in his comeback to Mulder, but it was still a telling sign of the deeply emotional issue that land is that he felt moved to warn Mulder to "tread very carefully."

Said Zuma, "The land question is one of the most emotive issues in our history and present, and must be handled with utmost care, and not in the careless and callous manner that Honorable Mulder handled it. It is extremely sensitive and to the majority of people in this country, it is a matter of life and death. Honorable Mulder stunned all of us and the whole country with his bold denial of historical facts about land dispossession."


The South African government has been at pains to assure the country’s white farmers that it would not exercise ‘the Zimbabwean option,’ but the fear of this remains deep amongst white farmers. They are already feeling besieged by violence against them on their farms, resulting in many deaths. The attacks against them are thought to be of a largely criminal nature, but the farmers accuse the authorities of indifference to their plight.

Recently suspended ruling party official Julius Malema is among those who have helped to heighten those land expropriation fears by expressing admiration for Zimbabwe’s controversial land reform, and advocating a similar process in South Africa.

No doubt the heated debate will continue, with little chance that deeply entrenched, emotionally held historical narratives will be changed on either side. But in the game of numbers that democratic politics is, it seems doubtful that Mulder will win over enough (or any) black South African views to his interpretation of the country’s violent land history.

It seems safe to predict that there are hot times ahead for South Africa with regard to land.

African Agriculture

South Africa debates pros and cons of privatizing communal land

by Teigue Payne

Land reform will become an even hotter topic this year as the debate revolves around whether or not to privatise communal land and what this would mean for current social and economic systems linked to the land use.

The Democratic Alliance has a private member's motion in Parliament that proposes the privatisation of all communal land in South Africa. But a recent research report takes the opposite view and says such a move could result in an entire social and economic system falling apart.

The research, conducted in the Pondoland area north of Port St Johns by Valerie Payn, a commercial farmer in KwaZulu-Natal, concludes that people in the area value the communal-lands allocation system because they are so poor that they cannot gain access to land in any other way.

Payn says instead of­privatisation more effort should be made to improve the productivity of communal lands.

Annette Steyn, the DA's spokesperson for rural development and land reform, believes privatisation would generally benefit the inhabitants of communal areas, mainly because many people leave these areas to move to cities and give their land to relatives who do little with it.

Steyn says communal-area land reform received only a one-line mention in the recent green paper on land reform, even though as many as 20-million South Africans live in communal areas.

Payn and Steyn apparently agree that many people are too poor to get land, but Steyn says she has been informed of situations in which land rights were taken away when the chief was unhappy with the user. She believes the system allows for land to be manipulated as a way to control rural people.

The only way to appeal is through the tribal authority, which falls under the jurisdiction of the chief, making it fundamentally undemocratic, according to Steyn.

"Communal ownership also makes rural women vulnerable if land rights are alienated when their spouses pass away. Security of land title would not jeopardise the capacity of a chief to provide guidance or leadership on matters of culture and ritual. Little or no progress has been made to bring development to most communal areas. I believe the reason for this is that the traditional authorities and the elected councillors do not agree. We need a discussion on the rights of South Africans 'owning' land worth billions while remaining the poorest of the poor."

Payn says communal land is not just about production of agricultural goods. It also supports a wide variety of other facets of the traditional way of life. She says the land in her focus area is highly productive and heavily utilised for a wide range of purposes, including the production of food and harvesting of building and craft materials and medicinal plants.

In many instances women are the primary farmers, keeping the household alive. One woman told her: "We don't agree with the idea of selling land. If you sell land, how will people without money be able to get hold of the land they need to grow food? Our system works well. You are given the land that you need to grow the food you need, so there is always enough food. If you don't need it any more, it can be given [by the chief] to someone else who needs it."

Payn says although livestock on communal lands has contributed to considerable environmental degradation and erosion, the training of herders in modern methods of targeted "biological grazing" - increasingly being used by commercial farmers -- can achieve excellent improvements in both veld condition and stock yields without fencing or creating paddocks.

Payn says many households would starve without the food they produce, and they would not have houses if they did not have access to natural building materials. A wide range of crops is grown, including vegetables, maize and a variety of fruit trees.

Time-series mapping on the Wild Coast indicates there has been both an increase and a decrease in cultivation in the same areas. Payn says there has been a shift from large, labour-intensive communally farmed fields to smaller, less labour-intensive garden-type cultivation around individual homesteads. This may be because of the departure of men for migrant labour, the unwillingness of the younger generation to work in the fields and the end of the system of voluntary reciprocal communal work parties. She found that although fields were smaller than in the past, there were more of them.

Agriculture on the Wild Coast is still largely done for subsistence purposes and little of the crops produced is sold, mainly because of the difficulty in finding ways to market them.

One subsistence farmer told Payn: "Some of the food we grow is sold to local people, but because everyone grows their own it is difficult to sell locally. We could grow a lot more if we had somewhere to sell it."

The function of the former trading stores as middlemen has fallen away as they have been replaced by chain retailers.

"The old traders would barter five bags of maize for some of their goods, or they would buy small amounts of maize and store it in a silo until they had enough to sell to the mills. The chain stores no longer do this. They usually source their fresh produce in the Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg markets," says Payn.

Despite this, some small-scale farmers she researched did make a fair income from marketing their produce.

Payn rejects the notion that young people do not want to become farmers and the current older generation will be the last to use the land. But she admits that "the older people are happier to do farming for self-sufficiency and subsistence. The younger generation also want crops which would generate income."

A major factor in the lack of income-producing potential for communal farmers is that prices for agricultural products have declined over many years and farmers face competition from all over the world, including countries where farming is subsidised. Commercial farmers face the same pressures, which has caused a decrease in the number of commercial farmers and an increase in the size of farming units.

Instead of privatising communal land, Payn believes ways should be found to improve the productive capacity of small-scale farmers and help them find markets. She agrees, however, that they should be given more security of tenure and protection against unscrupulous and corrupt chiefs and politicians.

Subsistence farmers may need temporary subsidisation or, like all farmers, more tariff protection, Payn says. She believes there is a strong correlation between the continued use of communal land for agriculture and social and community cohesion.

In places where there has been a pronounced decline in cultural traditions, traditional systems of agriculture are often in ruins. She does not believe, however, that the breakdown of traditional communities is inevitable and where it has occurred it can be reversed.

Mail and Guardian

Farmer dispossessed in Zimbabwe’s land reform gives his views

Christopher Jarrett had his farm in southern Zimbabwe taken from him in 2002 as part of the ‘fast track’ land reform programme of President Robert Mugabe’s government. The efforts of him and others in his position to find remedy in Zimbabwean and regional courts over the years have not succeeded.

Jarrett gave his views on the controversies surrounding the whole exercise to a delegation of the European Union mission in Zimbabwe that was visiting his region, on January 31 2012.

He starts by summarizing the effects of the expropriations on the country’s economy over most of the first decade of this century.

Then, “We now come to the meat of the matter. How are we going to fix this mess so that the private sector can again fill its core role of generating employment whilst at the same time generating wealth for all?”

Banks have been afraid to lend to old or new, post-reform farmers because of all the continuing uncertainties to do with land tenure. A constitutional amendment made all expropriated farm land property of the State. Successful post-reform applicants for land are given ‘offer letters,’ which can then lead to 99 year leases. However, it is far from clear that the leases can serve as collateral for farming finance, although that is being discussed with banks.

The main basis on which Jarrett argues for the sanctity of the title deeds based system of land tenure is access to agricultural finance. He says, “We must face up to it that neither government nor anyone else has the depth of finance necessary to bankroll annually an agricultural system structurally incapable of funding itself. Commercial agriculture used to fund itself through a robust and powerful banking sector using title to the land as collateral. This funding did not cost the taxpayer anything.”

“Now we have a crass system where very little can be produced except from beneficiaries’ limited own resources. The taxpayer through government is thus obliged to provide finance for inputs, most of which funding is never recovered. Those who benefit from these hand outs have no binding obligation to pay. There is no sanction such as loss of security of tenure lurking in the wings should these so-called “loans” not be repaid. There is no need to repay because there is no effective recourse and this adds to our collective impoverishment as our taxes are wasted.”

Not surprisingly, there is generally a huge gulf in the perspectives of white farmers like Jarrett and many/most black Zimbabweans on many aspects of the origins of the land problem, what caused what to happen, and on the best way forward.

Jarrett accuses the Mugabe government of deliberately denying Zimbabweans security of land tenure through title deeds in order ‘to keep the general population poor, subservient and no threat to the status quo.’

Jarrett’s mentions in passing different, non title-deeds based ‘security of tenure’ systems in other countries he cites favorably. But for Zimbabwe, he makes it clear that he believes a return to the pre-2000 title based system is the only viable option.

Says Jarrett, “We do not just promote and sponsor these conditions (secure and inviolate title to land) in order to restore our own rights, but we believe they should be extended into the communal areas.”

Jarrett argues that once small scale farmers have title deeds, they too will be more easily able to access finance, since their tradable title deeds can be used as collateral, which they do not currently have.

However, it is not clear that lack of collateral is the main reason for lack of smallholder access to finance. In the case of widespread small scale farmer loan defaults, would it be politically realistic in most African countries for banks to conduct mass foreclosures? It is particularly doubtful that this could work in a country with the particularly charged land history of Zimbabwe. It might be a long-established principal and practice for larger scale commercial farmers, but it is doubtful the same model can be transferred wholesale to small scale farmers. This is one reason why in most countries, the modes of financing small scale farmers are fundamentally different from the accepted loan and collateral model of agribusiness.

Jarrett mentions the increasing calls in Zimbabwe for a new system of security of tenure, for the ‘new farmers’ to have confidence to make long-term plans and investments. He does not recognize the legality of the government’ invalidation of the old title deeds of farmers like him. He says that secure tenure for the new farmers “is impossible whilst the owner (like him) still holds ownership and proof thereof in the form of his title deeds. Government is clearly incapable of compensating owners in order to take over their real rights in the land. No one can transfer a right which they do not possess. “

For the government and many Africans, that argument of Jarrett’s is agreed with, but interpreted in a radically different way: that those title deeds sought to whitewash and legitimize the theft of African land in the colonial era. Jarrett means the government does not legally own the land because displaced farmers like him still have their title deeds and were not paid to transfer ownership to that government. On the other hand, the government says the transfer of land from Africans, decades ago under various colonial governments, to what was then designated as title deeds-based ‘European land,’ is the original illegitimate transfer. It is fundamentally a clash of world views.

Says Jarrett, “The point to digest is that the land seizure problem is not going away with the passage of time. It is impossible to confiscate people’s property without fair compensation being paid. There are numerous examples of countries which have tried going down this same route, but there is not one country to our knowledge which has managed to hold on to the spoils.”

Again, it is possible to find agreement on this statement between many ex white farmers like Jarrett and many Africans, but very significant difference on which ‘land seizure problem’ is the more legitimate basis on which to find a base from which to move forward. Is it the seizure of land decades ago by colonial governments from Africans to then consign it to the title deeds-based system of ‘European land?’ Or is it the more recent seizure of white-occupied land from farmers like Jarrett to then re-distribute it to Africans as part of ‘redressing colonial imbalances?’

Jarrett’s only referral to the existence of a raging controversy about this issue is a cryptic, “The Far East, although having different standards of tenure looks forward, not back to their colonial era.”

The suggestion is that colonial land bygones should be bygones. The problem is that many of the Africans in countries with racially charged land issues like Zimbabwe and South Africa see many aspects of the issue from a perspective opposite to that of people like Jarrett. Ironically, Jarrett and other white farmers are for the first time able to partially see things from an African perspective they might have previously ignored or dismissed: that of a person unceremoniously stripped of his livelihood and what he considered his legitimate property.

While Jarrett shows no sign of seeing the other points of view that have resulted in there being the clash of world views that has led to the land problems that Zimbabwe and South Africa in particular face, he does have a suggestion for the way forward:

“Perhaps the best government can do is to mitigate their losses by returning seized land.”

To which that government would reply that it has done precisely that – returning land seized from Africans decades ago back to them.

Clearly the mindset gap between the two perspectives remains huge and perhaps unbridgeable.

Click here for Jarrrett’s full presentation.

African Agriculture

South African farmers’ union leader engages rather than confronts government over land reform

Theo de Jager, the deputy president of South African farmers’ union, AgriSA, says he is resisting increasing pressure "to go into confrontational mode" to force the government to remove the threat posed to the industry by its land reform policies.

He asks, "What would we do? Block off the rural roads for a day; occupy Pretoria?"

The report says that would be a counterproductive move for the country’s mostly white 37,000 commercial farmers to make themselves heard over a sensitive issue.

The greatest threat is not land reform, de Jager says, but what he feels is the disastrous way it is being implemented.

"The biggest threat to commercial agriculture is uncertainty. We have 13000 farms with unsettled land claims over them since 2000. Banks are not financing farmers who have land claims over their land."

Even if banks were prepared to lend, farmers will not invest in farms they may lose at any time. So productivity on these farms is being scaled down. Some have gone bankrupt.

De Jager believes AgriSA's strategy of "constructive engagement" has helped shift the mindset of government from the overt aggression of a few years ago, "when they saw commercial farmers as the enemy", to a position where it is prepared to "consider the plans we bring to the table and negotiate with us.”

"At least now we have an open door," he says.

But it was not constructive engagement alone that brought this change, he believes. It was more than 1000 South African farmers moving to neighboring countries.

"Since we started to negotiate these deals with other African governments we've detected a change in the attitude of our own government. Some of them realize that maybe South Africa needs its farmers more than the farmers need South Africa."

While there is "more appreciation" from politicians of the economic role commercial farmers can play (they employ 700000 people and "can create more jobs, cheaper, than any other sector"), the attitude of the officials below them is another matter entirely.

"With the officials we are still living on different planets," says De Jager. They're "quite aggressive" and more political than their political masters. "They seem to be a law unto themselves. Politics is all they see. They're not interested in practical or commercial issues." Their unhelpful attitude and dismal service record has both black and white farmers up in arms.

Negotiations at government level might be protracted but at least there is an occasional glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. But the daily reality that farmers face on the ground is very different because they are "at the mercy of these officials. That is why so many farmers are saying we must rather take a harder approach."

As a representative of South African farmers, De Jager, 49, is a bit of a surprise package. He has a PhD in political philosophy from Pretoria University.

How come he is in farming?

"What else are you going to do with a doctorate in political philosophy," he laughs. He did his thesis on the black consciousness philosophy of murdered South African political activist Steve Biko.

Later he worked in PW Botha's presidential office, before joining the national intelligence service for two years until 1991. Then he consulted for mining company Gencor and for the Nuclear Energy Corporation. He has been lecturing to the defense force on national security since 1991. He has traveled extensively in Africa.

What he finds appealing about African people is their emphasis on community, whereas in the Western mind the individual is the centre of everything. He fully supports the sentiment that Africa is a continent bursting with opportunities.

De Jager makes the telling point that 46% of the world's unutilized arable land is in Africa. If Africans - and he thinks farmers from South Africa have an important role to play here - do not wake up and use it the Chinese and Brazilians "will move in aggressively."

De Jager is himself a successful farmer in Limpopo. He started as a farm manager, and then bought his own farm, which he grew into a successful exporter of tropical fruit, small vegetables and flowers before it became the subject of a land claim. The state bought it and handed it to a local property association in 2005.

Fire destroyed much of it, including most of his orchards and a church used by his workers. The flowers, 174000 anthuriums, were left to die. He offered to form a joint venture with the new owners, but after three years was still negotiating. By the time the government gave approval he had bought another farm and was no longer interested. He reckons it would cost more to get the farm back into production than the government paid for it.

Now he has a 434 hectare timber and tropical fruit farm near Tzaneen, which became profitable enough to pay for a Cessna 182 four-seater plane that he pilots to his many meetings with affiliated farmers' unions and government.

He also visits as many farms around the country as he can, which is why De Jager knows better than anyone what their problems are and how dismally the government's land reform programme is failing the country.

"I've visited more than 200 of those farms. Very, very few of them are productive."

In spite of the daunting challenges, he believes commercial farmers "have a great future here. There are great business opportunities. Food and fiber production is a great industry to be in. We just have to hang in until the political climate cools down a bit," he says.

Having said that, however, De Jager says he is "scared" about what may happen this year. Before its national conference in Mangaung in December, the ANC will be under pressure to "perform", and the land issue is "always the last card" African governments play when they have nothing else to offer their supporters. His fear is that the ANC might "raise expectations without performing." That could unleash considerable social unrest, with farmers taking the brunt of it.

De Jager is not sure how much longer he is going to be around. He has been deputy president of AgriSA for four years. His time is nearly up and he doubts he will have enough support to make president.

"Heading the transformation portfolio at AgriSA is not the best way to be popular," De Jager laughs.


Business Live

Is Ethiopia repeating Zimbabwe’s colonial-era land tenure mistakes?

by Chido Makunike

Ethiopia seems to feature more than any other African country in the charges of accommodating large land deals or land ‘grabs’ (choose depending on your bias) by foreign farming investors.

There is controversy about almost every aspect of them. Are the terms of the deals not too much in favor of the investors? What are those terms exactly? Will the host countries benefit much from them, or will they mostly be another type of resource plunder? How can Africa’s mostly communal land tenure systems be made compatible with commercial land leasing and ownership systems? Does the big new role of foreigners in answering that long outstanding question not create resentment and foster resistance to these deals?

Controversial as the deals may be, is it not necessary and unavoidable that at least some communal land gives way to high-intensity commercial use of one type or another? Has this not happened everywhere else in the course of ‘development?’ In respecting traditional communal land tenure indefinitely, would governments not actually be condemning many of their most vulnerable citizens to perpetual poverty, given declining soil fertility, increasing population pressures, climate unpredictability and so on; all factors that increasingly threaten the viability of rural life?

But then again, in countries where many have little else on which to sustain themselves except subsistence farming, is removing rural communities from their lands and livelihoods, no matter how basic, to make way for commercial farming not condemning them to an even more uncertain fate in new, unfamiliar territory?

These are just a few of the questions that face nearly all African countries, even those not currently in the news for ‘land grabs.’ These are issues that long preceded the current wave of land deals. None of the range of answers is as easy or straightforward as either supporters or opponents of the current deals would suggest.

Governments, investors and many others in between have often taken very simplistic positions on the land deals that leave out many of the complicated nuances. Media and various non-government organizations with their own rigid ideological or commercial interests at stake in supporting or opposing the land deals have only added to the confusion.

In making aggressive moves to develop a commercial agriculture sector, in many ways Ethiopia is going where Zimbabwe has been.

In certain media, any mention of Zimbabwe must automatically go hand in hand with phrases such as ‘Mugabe’s land grabs’ and the country ‘went from regional farming breadbasket to basket case.’ The idea is to emphasize the recent disruption of a system of title deeds-based farmland tenure that was long taken for granted, and a sophisticated, thriving commercial farming sector that was widely admired. ‘Mugabe’s land grabs’ from white farmers from about the year 2000 changed much of this. The country experienced several years of economic decline which it only arrested a few years ago, and is still  battling to rise from.

As successful as the ‘breadbasket’ was, the considerable emotion that events in Zimbabwe elicit in a surprising number of people even far removed, means that there is little interest in going back a little in history to see the roots of the eventual dismantling of the land tenure system that gave rise to it. How did that commercial, Western-style farmland tenure system come about?

It came about in ways somewhat similar to what is being alleged the present Ethiopian government is doing in displacing rural communities to make way for foreign farm investors.

From the early 1900s, white settlers in the then Rhodesia were given by the colonial governments huge parcels of land from which Africans had been uprooted. The ‘villagization’ that the Ethiopian government is said/accused to be embarking on today sounds vaguely similar to the ‘tribal trust lands’ to which Africans were forcibly moved by colonial governments from the early days of Rhodesia.

In both cases, the main reason was to give prime land to the favored elite of the time, whether white settlers then in Rhodesia or investors in Ethiopia today. However, incidental benefits for the displaced communities were also cited as justifications for the land grabs. In Rhodesia, it was said that the concentration of once widely scattered communities into fewer, smaller areas would make it easier for the colonial government to provide them various services, such as agricultural extension, schools and so on. In Ethiopia today, relocations which critics say are forced and violent, but which the government insists are voluntary, are explained as being to better enable access to schools, clinics and other basic social services.

Few of Rhodesia’s early white settlers had any farming experience at the time of getting land which had been grabbed from Africans. Many were rewarded with land for their role in African conquest, and some as thanks from then colonial power Britain for their service in Europe’s early 20^th century civil wars.

Title deeds-based land tenure on the grabbed land replaced the traditional communal tenure system of the dispossessed Africans. It was on this grabbed land that successive colonial governments supported the new land holders to develop into the impressive commercial farming sector that powered Rhodesia’s economy, and later Zimbabwe’s.

From a distance and from outside, and for a while even in the country itself, all that appeared on the surface was the farming and economic success. Below the surface, the sense of  grievance on which these successes were built was muted as long as the Africans enjoyed some of its crumbs, as farms workers or in the many downstream industries that resulted. But it never went away. It might have appeared as ancient history and finished colonial business for the then well-established descendants of the original white settlers, but it was a quietly present and continuing ‘issue’ for many Africans. The period from the colonial land grabs of the early 1900s to independence in 1980 was short enough that there were still many people alive who had personal memory of how they were chased from family lands, their cattle expropriated; forced labor and various taxes imposed on them. These stories were passed on from generation to generation in every African family.

The sense of African grievance that continued to fester over the land issue meant that all recognized the need for some type of land reform after 1980. One reason mostly polite discussion dragged on about the issue was the difficulty of how to raise the money to compensate the white land owners for any ceding of land to Africans they might agree to. In other words, the title deeds they held on land that had been grabbed from Africans several decades before were by most people seen as inviolate.

There was no talk, or very little, of invalidating the land deeds of black-ruled Zimbabwe because the land had been grabbed from Africans several decades before. It was sort of accepted that land reform negotiations would start on the basis and from the starting point of the colonial, title-based land tenure system, not the traditional African communal system that existed before that.                    

One of the reasons that ‘Mugabe’s land grabs’ have been so controversial, even emotional for many people, including those not directly involved, is that he invoked not the colonial title deed as the basis for land ownership legitimacy, but the land ownership rights of Africans before that; the ones that were grabbed from those Africans by the colonial governments. This was a very new post-colonial precedent that worries and outrages many people for all sorts of reasons not necessary to get into for the purpose of the present discussion.

Zimbabweans of all types were proud of their relatively developed, diversified economy and the ‘breadbasket’ commercial farming sector that underpinned it. All Zimbabweans suffered from the economic crisis that followed the recent land ‘re-grabs’ that were not well thought out. But it is interesting and important to note that there wasn’t/isn’t any  significant African sentiment for those land re-grabs to be reversed. Most Zimbabweans  want the land reform process and commercial agriculture fixed, but probably very few would advocate for the status quo to go back to the system of title deeds that originate in the era of colonial land grabbing.

If the old system of title deeds-based security of tenure is deemed illegitimate on the basis that they were issued on grabbed land, how is a new system of security of tenure to be built to give people the incentive to invest in land and ‘commercial’ farming again? Once today’s communal land has become a fully tradable commodity, how do poor rural farmers gain access to land and avoid being further marginalized by the few who can afford to buy it and acquire title deeds?  Despite the increasingly apparent problems plaguing it, is Africa’s communal land tenure system really outdated and to be discarded, or does it still serve useful functions that no other system can fully do? Could the traditional communal system and a new title-based system co-exist in the same area?

There are many answers proffered, but none that are universally accepted or that address all the related historical, legal, cultural, political and economic issues easily. 

It is easy to see the mess that this presents. For example, suppose you were a white farmer with a title deed in 2000 that lost his farm to the most recent ‘land grab.‘ What about if you had not inherited the land from an early 1900s British settler ancestor, but had bought it from the son or grandson of such a settler? Is ‘Mugabe’s land grab’ not clearly, obviously illegal and unfair to such a title holder? But what about if you were an African farm laborer on that same land, whose grandfather had been the early 1900s land holder from whom the land had been grabbed by the colonial government. It was then given, with title deed, to the white settler whose progeny then eventually sold the land and its title deed to today’s white farmer of my example.

Whose ‘ownership’ and whose ‘justice’ should prevail, and why?

If the colonial land tenure system was widely seen as unjust and illegitimate, clearly it is no longer possible or desirable to go back to the pre-colonial communal system, at least not on what had become ‘commercial’ farms. The people and times have largely changed. The need for that land to remain ‘commercially’ useful is recognized by all. Having demolished the system that existed for decades for its political/historical incorrectness, how do you build a new one that is politically correct while also giving land holders the room and incentive to invest and be productive? It is very far from straightforward.

To get back to today’s Ethiopian ‘land grabs,’ what is or isn’t happening in that country is from a distance very murky. It is almost impossible to accurately gauge the objectivity of the reports of those who slam or support the new land deals.

However, part of the lesson of Zimbabwe is that particularly in mostly agrarian societies, perceived ‘land grabs’ can set up a multiplicity of new problems decades after it appears they have been accepted as irreversible. Regardless of what impressive modern edifice is built upon land that there is majority consensus was unfairly ‘grabbed,’ especially in favor of ‘outsiders,’ there for a very long time will remain the explosive potential for conflict. All it needs is some small spark to set it off. 

Leading Indian agro-investor in Ethiopia, rose grower/exporter Karuturi Global, has been perhaps the most prominent beneficiary of what many people say are the government’s ‘land grabs ’ from its citizens.

Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, the company’s founder, dismisses the attacks. In a recent interview, he gave some of his perspectives on land and farming in his host country.

”Land is an emotive and contentious issue. Of the 300 million hectares of land we have, only one-third is arable. Africa is better in terms of productivity, costs, taxes, duty-free access to European markets because of their least developed country status. A rose from India, when it lands in Europe, will cost about 14 euro cents and it will be about 30% less from East Africa,“ said Karuturi.

Clearly he is a bold entrepreneur, and no doubt that alone rubs some people the wrong way. As he repeatedly points out, his company is doing nothing without the approval of the Ethiopian government. But if the investment is seen by many Ethiopians as being because of a closeness to the sitting government rather than as being of benefit to the country, Karuturi is inevitably breeding long-term local resentment in addition to roses.

As seen in Zimbabwe, the ‘security of tenure’ and economic success that is built on the mistreatment of the local people may not be as secure as it seems, even if the comeuppance is many decades later. If the political situation suddenly changes, land tenure based on a perceived crony relationship with the previous ruling political dispensation will be one of the first things to be reformed.  

Karuturi has also been quoted as scoffing that many of the attacks on his and others’ land investments in Ethiopia and other African countries is by Western critics who have yet to come to terms with how China and India are displacing the West in many areas of engagement in Africa. While this cannot be dismissed entirely, Karuturi is ironically also making some of the same colonial - style moves that created long-standing resentment not only in Africa, but in his country India as well.

For example, it is quite likely that even for Ethiopians who basically support the investment thrust of their government and welcome the contributions of companies like Karuturi, the company’s widely publicized plan to bring in thousands of Indian tenant farmers to its Ethiopian holdings will be seen as a step too far. It suggests thinking and attitudes that are amazingly reminiscent of the origins of the complicated mix of land-related problems that plague Zimbabwe today.

In the land grabs from Africans of a century ago, the colonial governments obviously did not need to worry about the ‘public opinion’ of the dispossessed, disgruntled Africans. Today, no matter how autocratic a government may be, it is neither advisable nor entirely possible to ignore public sentiment. From a distance, in this regard the Ethiopian government seems to have contributed to the negative perception of the current land deals/grabs by poorly explaining them, and riding roughshod over critics. For both investors and host governments, these too are issues that may have an expensive belated political cost.

Zimbabwe is just one and perhaps the best known, most notorious example of the explosive potential of long unresolved land issues that Ethiopia could learn some lessons from on what to do and what not to do as it seeks to develop and ‘modernize’ its agriculture. It will be fascinating to watch how Ethiopia tackles the clash of land-related issues that have defied easy solution in many other African countries.

AfricanAgriculture

Interrogating Africa’s traditional communal land tenure systems

by Chido Makunike

In having a relatively small land mass and high population density, Rwanda is unlike most other African countries. This makes its land use and management challenges much more urgent and of a different nature than those of countries that have more ‘spare’ land.

Until the coming of European colonization, land tenure systems in Africa were almost exclusively based on some form of communal ownership and use. Individual title deeds are now the norm in urban areas but in most countries, rural land is still under some form of communal ownership, with traditional community leaders being in charge of allocating land, often even where government has legal title to the land.

Title to rural farmland is common in countries that have significant European ‘settler’ communities, such as Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Land that was grabbed from the Africans was then defined as ‘European land’ on which title deeds were then issued out to the settler beneficiaries. These colonial land grabs have in Zimbabwe been used as the political basis for the controversial recent land ‘re grabs’ from white farmers.

In all countries, rapidly increasing populations, climate and environmental pressures on the land mean that traditional land ownership system are not sustainable in the long term. To give just one example, in most societies traditionally the sons would inherit the father’s land. Large land masses, low populations and high mortality rates were some of the factors that helped make the system work. But today’s conditions mean many more pressures on the land, requiring different solutions.

None of the required new solutions are obvious or easy. Most African societies are still agrarian, but under conditions that mean the land can no longer sufficiently support all the people on it for population, soil fertility, climate and many other reasons. Many people are drifting to towns, but not because of any significant industrialization or other opportunities offered there. The urban areas are seen as offering more, easier opportunities to scrape together a living than do the rural areas. Those who remain on the land may work as hard as they ever did, or harder, but for declining returns.

All these problems are concentrated in a small, population-dense country like Rwanda.

“Get Peasants Off Land for Their Own Survival” is an interesting November 2011 article (http://allafrica.com/stories/201111150602.html) by Edward Ojulu looking at Rwanda’s options to address these issues.

Ojulu says a law passed in 2005 ‘‘gives the government of Rwanda authority to manage and regulate the use of all land in the country.’’

Among the points he makes:

* ‘Land in most parts of Africa has been in the hands of subsistence (peasant) farmers who apply crude tools and methods of cultivation to produce food barely enough for their own domestic consumption. With high population growth rates, peasants have further eroded land productivity by fragmenting the land into tiny plots that can hardly produce enough food for a family of five. ‘

* ‘In the case of Rwanda, one of the most densely populated countries on planet earth, official statistics show that there is one hectare of land for every nine Rwandans. And this is diminishing due to high birth rates, with the country's population is expected to hit 16 million by 2020.

His bold conclusion is that, ‘The time is therefore now to institute bold land reforms to remove a peasant farmer off the land to allow proper and sustainable management by the State, whose role in ensuring food security has now become more critical.’

One might question whether a key direct role for government in ensuring food security is the best solution to the problems he outlines, but he anticipates this, stating, ‘It is suicidal for any government in Africa today to shy away from this role. When people don't have food, they accuse the government of negligence. There are already signs of unrest and political instability cause by food scarcity in the region.’

Ojulu goes even further in arguing for tough measures by the State to take charge of land use and food production.

He writes, ‘The time is now for the state in Africa to take full control of land by expropriating it for commercial food production. This will require not half-hearted measures but a very elaborate agricultural revolution that will see peasants relocate to planned settlements from where they will commute to work in farms and the agro-processing industries that will emerge as a result of commercial products.’

‘With the new law that gives nationals only leasing rights on the land they occupy, this country can indeed put an end to land fragmentation. This is possible because a father of 10 sons who is currently living on a hectare, no longer has the right to sub-divide it into plots and distribute to his sons. He needs the permission of the landlord (the state) to transfer his lease rights,’ says Ojulu.

While the issues he raises are important, none of the answers may be as easy and straightforward as Ojulu suggests. Several countries have tried the mass relocation of peasants to ‘planned settlements’ under various guises, but rarely with successful results. One example that comes to mind is the Ujamaa experiment of the late president, Julius Nyerere, in Tanzania, which caused more problems than it solved.

In colonial Rhodesia, Africans were moved from their ancestral lands to ‘tribal trust lands’ where they were to be provided centralized services, while the grabbed land from which they had been moved was titled to white settlers who then became farmers. This was obviously a strong reason for African disgruntlement, eventually leading up to a long, bitter independence war, and accounting for the recent controversial but also popular Zimbabwean land ‘re-grabs’ of recent years.

Ethiopia in particular has been in the news a lot recently for allegedly ‘grabbing’ a lot of communally held land from peasant farmers to cede to foreign agro-investors. But this type of modern day land ‘grabbing’ by African governments under pressure to provide food and economic solutions is hardly unique to Ethiopia. Whether the results of this grabbing will be the net positives Ojulu seems to assume will only become clear in coming years.

In Zimbabwe, the thriving commercial farms that were built up on colonially grabbed African land led to many other problems which did not become fully obvious for many decades. So even if Ojulu’s idea of expropriating low-productivity land to make higher productivity use were basically sound, how this difficult process is carried out makes a big difference to the political acceptability, and the ultimate success of the change.

While Ojulu is right to say that in times of food scarcity people expect the government to make aggressive moves to avert hunger, this is not necessarily at all the same as advancing a direct role for the State in farming. There are almost no examples in Africa of government successfully being directly involved in agricultural production to any significant extent. Almost everywhere there has been farming success, it has been by government providing the conditions for small or large scale private farmers to then thrive.

In today’s developed countries, the migration from rural peasantry to urban wage labor was an ‘organic’ outcome of the process of industrialization. That process has not significantly happened in Africa. In Africa the migration is from poor and declining prospects in the rural areas to urban prospects that are not much better. Even if Ethiopia or Rhodesia-style mass relocations of rural communities to make way for agri-business improved food production, there is no reason to think that the millions of people displaced would find productive accommodation in the towns or downstream agro-industries.

Agro-industries imply mechanization, so any jobs produced would not match the numbers of people displaced from rural areas. In any case, rural peasants would hardly be the choice of employee for any industry. And even in the case of new mega farm holdings, their workers will be measured in thousands of people, not hundreds of thousands or millions. A significant, difficult question that all African countries face, therefore, is if you expropriate land from rural peasants for reasons similar to those given by Ojulu, what do all the displaced people do?

Whatever one thinks of Ojulu’s conclusions, he does do a good job of presenting some of the pressing issues to do with land tenure systems needing revision all over Africa.

African Agriculture

Are Zimbabwe's new farmers winning, 10 years after land reform?

by Martin Plaut

In 2000, President Robert Mugabe launched Zimbabwe's controversial fast-track land reforms, seizing the majority of the 4,500 farms held by mostly white commercial farmers. More than a decade on, while some of the new farmers are doing well, others have found that if they cross the ruling party, they face losing their new land.

Shadrack Rwafa stands outside the home he has built. He is one of Zimbabwe's 170,000 new farmers, the proud owner of Land Hunger Farm. A short, muscular man, he has worked hard to grow crops on this dry, unforgiving soil, which used to be a cattle ranch.


It took two months just to dig the well, and he is proud of the clean, fresh water it produces. "It's like milk," he says.

Mr Rwafa is no ordinary farmer. He is a war veteran who fought against the white minority rule which ended in 1980, when Robert Mugabe replaced Ian Smith as the country's leader. In the intervening years he has been a sculptor, painter and miner.

But after Mr Mugabe inaugurated the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in 2000, Mr Rwafa saw his chance. He joined the invasion of a white-owned farm in the area in the south-east of the country. Many of the commercial farms were seized violently, but Mr Rwafa says his case was different.



"We didn't just come without talking to the then farm owner. We asked 'can we share the land' and that's how we came here," says Mr Rwafa. "He accepted and there was no violence at this place. We even helped him to put his sheep on the truck and he left us some fertilizers and we parted nicely."

The farm is the fulfilment of his life-long dream. Today he grows peanuts, beans and maize and says his life has improved dramatically.

A ranch that once raised cattle has been split into 252 separate units, each farmed by a family growing a range of crops as well as raising some cattle.

Mr Rwafa says it is far more productive than it was when it was commercially farmed.

The farm's former owner was not available for comment.

The progress of Mr Rwafa and his fellow new farmers in Masvingo Province has been recorded by a 10-year research project, conducted by the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, which followed 400 new farmers.


How are they doing now?


Around 10% of the new farmers have abandoned the land altogether. 33% have kept the land, but are only involved in limited production. A further 21% are supplementing their income from other sources, like teaching, gold panning or from remittances from relatives. Only 35% are really making a go of farming and beginning to accumulate some wealth (Source: Institute of Development Studies)

It is one of a number of studies which challenge popular perceptions that Zimbabwe's land reform programme has been an unmitigated disaster.

The Sussex University study does, however, accept that the process has had setbacks.

Only just over a third of the new farmers are doing well, about a fifth are supplementing their income by other means, and the rest are struggling, are not using the land for active production, or have given up altogether.

Even this sober view is challenged.

Economic consultant John Robertson suggests that agricultural output is only around 50% of the level it was before the land invasions began in 2000.

"Most of the new people involved who are farming the land that was confiscated from the large-scale farmers are producing enough for themselves and not much more," says Mr Robertson.

Land invasions have not ended. Just as we were visiting new farmers like Mr Rwafa, a white farmer lost the land he was born on. He did not want his name to be mentioned - the whole issue is too politically sensitive - but he seemed almost resigned to what had taken place.

"You didn't have to be a genius to work out that we weren't going to be there for the rest of our lives. One supposes they could stop it now, but I think they do not want to see a white on the land, and don't need to see any whites left," he says, more in sorrow than anger.

Mr Robertson believes the entire land redistribution exercise was meant to create a system of patronage, through a pool of voters who were dependent on the ruling Zanu-PF party.

"If you display your loyalty to the ruling party, you will get a free piece of land. If you show any disloyalty to the party, guess what… you'll lose it," he says.

Not even high-ranking Zanu-PF members are necessarily secure.

Tracy Mutinhiri was deputy minister of labour and social welfare until the middle of this year. She was also a beneficiary of land reform, with one of the biggest farms in the country. Then she began to get too close to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the former opposition, which is now in an uneasy government of national unity with President Mugabe's party.

"When we got into the inclusive government, I wanted to work with everybody. That's how it started: building up and building up, and then one day they decided to come and invade my farm," says Ms Mutinhiri.

"If it could happen to me, it could happen to anybody else," she adds.

But the real losers in this process have been the 500,000 workers who were once employed on the commercial farms.

Many were seen as potential MDC supporters, and were therefore not allocated any of the redistributed land. I spoke to some of these workers who were too fearful to be named.

"Sometimes we are getting by on just $10 (£6.40) a month," says one woman, a former farm worker, now living in a disused tobacco barn.

The farm workers' official minimum wage is $44 (£28.80) per month.

"We are really suffering, and we don't know how we're going to live. This land reform must be reversed, and maybe our life can change."

President Mugabe's land reforms have had a mixed outcome, with at least as many farm workers losing their livelihoods as there are new farmers working their own land.

The country is also now a net food importer where it once exported grain to the region.

The United Nations World Food Programme is appealing for $42m (£27m) to help more than one million Zimbabweans get through to the harvest early next year.


BBC

Water woes, legal issues leave 20 Namibia farms unoccupied

by Irene !Hoaës
The Ministry of Lands and Resettlement has confirmed that up to 20 farms (translating into 37 farming units), lie unoccupied after they were allocated to their intended beneficiaries since 2005. Most of the farms were allocated between 2005 and 2010.

The majority are in the Karasburg district of the Karas Region, while a few are in the Lüderitz, Bethanie and Keetmanshoop districts.

According to the Acting Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Dr Nashilongo Shivute, many of these units are unoccupied due to lack of functional water infrastructure, while three units are unoccupied due to a pending legal matter.

Shivute said the problem is prevalent all over the country, although this happens mostly in the Karas Region, where the ministry acquired 71 farms.

Shivute said more than 90 percent of the farm beneficiaries are from Karas, Hardap and Omaheke regions, while a few are from Khomas, Otjozondjupa and the Northern Communal Areas (NCA).

She admitted that the problem is due to bureaucratic procedures, whereby farms remain unoccupied for a long period of time, and hence they risk vandalism. In addition, Shivute said, farms are demarcated into a number of farming units, thus, some farming units may not have functional water infrastructure, by resettlement or allocation. She said that her ministry was attending to the problem and has been implementing a major water infrastructure rehabilitation programme since 2007.

At least 20 percent of the N$50 million annually allocated for land acquisition is used for infrastructure development.

A total of 141 farms are currently being rehabilitated under Phase 1 of the project and an amount of more than N$40 million has been spent on water infrastructure rehabilitation programme over the past four years, Shivute said.

According to her, the number of unoccupied farming units could have been more than 60 if the major water infrastructure development programme had not have been implemented.


Many critics of Namibia’s land reform programme blame the dilapidation of farming infrastructure on the lengthy process involved in buying, demarcating, and allocating farming units to beneficiaries.

Namibia has inherited a skewed pattern of land distribution. Thus it is trying to address this pattern through its land reform programme, which is viewed by many Namibians as very slow and frustrating.

New Era 

Land reform progress slow in Namibia

by Catherine Sasman

Despite claims by Namibian Minister of Lands and Resettlement Alpheus !Naruseb that the land reform programme is on track, the situation on the ground reads differently, insisted civil society organisations at a weekend indaba on land.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Republic of Namibia (ELCRN), Nangof Trust, the Namibia National Farmers Union (NNFU), and grassroots organisation for the landless //Naosan /Aes, concluded that land reform in fact seems not to be a government priority.

According to the Lands Ministry's statistics, 293 resettlement farms were bought at a cost of N$560 million since independence, resettling 4 000 beneficiaries, with an estimated 200 000 Namibians indicating that they want access to land to engage in productive agricultural activities.

The civil organisations concluded that there is a "complete lack of vision" for the resettlement programme", adding that the land reform programme has been divorced from agricultural production, and demanded for a complete review of the criteria for resettlement.

NNFU executive director Oloff Munjanu suggested that the current resettlement criteria is widening the gap between rich and poor blacks, urging for an audit on the socio-economic impact of resettlement so far.

Government indicated that low budgetary allocations and uncontrolled prices of commercial farms on offer meant that it could not buy up more land. And yet, said the civil society organisations, large tracks of land belonging to absentee landlords remain unoccupied, and that, as a case in point, 36 farms bought for resettlement purposes in the Karas region have still not been allocated.

Furthermore, they said a mechanism must be devised to identify un-utilised or underutilised commercial farms of absentee landlords for expropriation.

The organisations suggested that ancestral land rights should be evoked as part of the land reform programme, which is a departure from the recommendations of the 1991 national land conference upon which Government's land reform efforts are hinged.

They further said Government's inability to deal with illegal fencing, particularly in northern Namibia, has led to a scenario where those squeezed off land compete with others for resettlement further south.

Moreover, said the organisations, Government is slow to exploit the full potential of communal areas, arguing that some interventions are "misplaced and a waste of scarce resources", such as the 20-hectare farming units in particularly livestock areas.

They called for a comprehensive package of support to communal areas to address tenure security, infrastructure development, fencing and roads.

Government was called upon to resolve the tribal disputes in the Okavango region that has denied support for development of more than 42 farming units to communal farmers.

The pending eviction of Audabib squatting communities now moved to November 21 was discussed, and the gathering extended an urgent call on Khomas governor Samuel Nuuyoma to intervene.

It said a stakeholders forum must be convened by Government between the "so-called" title holders and the affected community for a lasting solution.

Other communities in the former Rehoboth gebiet facing eviction are in Stinkwater, â‰Hatsamas and Tsumis Park, which lead ELCRN's Uhuru Dempers to suggest that the "crisis cases" of the gebiet be dealt with comprehensively, instead of in a piecemeal fashion.

The indaba bemoaned the fact that land reform is not reflected as a key strategy in Government's poverty reduction plan, or the third National Development Plan (NDP 3).

A task force was formed to coordinate and monitor the implementation of recommendations of the indaba.

This task force was also mandated to call for a consultative forum with local and regional authorities, including governors and the lands ministry officials, to discuss the plight of small-scale farmers in municipal or town lands.

The Namibian

Housing, not land, is the key issue in South Africa

by John FW Morgan

Professors Gutto and Teffo (“Deconstructing the land question”, November 6 and 13) are avid advocates of reintroducing an indigenous African concept of common ownership of land and find what they describe as the “colonial” legal system’s concept of private ownership of land “very strange”.

The legal concept of private ownership of land reaches back into antiquity and can only be described as “colonial” in that it was the colonial powers that introduced the concept into South Africa.

Although some indigenous societies still maintain the concept that land cannot be privately owned, this is an exception and in most democratically ruled countries land, just like companies and businesses, is usually available for private ownership.

Of course, many European countries also originally had a concept of common land but this gradually died out as more modern farming methods were introduced, particularly during the Industrial Revolution.

In England it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that common land was finally abolished almost everywhere, aided by acts of parliament.

South Africa’s constitution and legal system are based on proven concepts in other developed or developing countries and not on indigenous concepts, so it would be strange if land were to be singled out for special treatment.

Indeed, abolishing private ownership of land would in no way help solve one of the major problems of the country, which is the extreme and still growing gap between rich and poor.

The imbalances in land ownership between black and white simply reflect the fact that, in broad terms, the whites are rich and the blacks poor.

In all developing countries, the poor masses tend to leave the countryside for the towns in the hope of finding better-paid employment, as also happened in Europe during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. This generally leads to overcrowding, slums and crime in the urban areas.

At the same time, the rural areas have to supply food for the growing urban population and this can only be done by employing more efficient farming methods and operating larger farms on a commercial basis.

Redistributing farmland in small areas to black farmers will neither benefit the individual farmers nor the country, which needs to be as self-sufficient as possible so far as food production is concerned.

There is a popular myth in the country that property ownership is essential for self-respect and well-being. It may, therefore, come as a shock for many to learn that in such wealthy countries as Germany, France and the Netherlands only 43 percent, 52 percent and 55 percent of the population respectively own property.

The remainder are tenants.

Quite apart from this, even in developed countries, land ownership is very unequal. For example, in England just 1 percent of the population own about 70 percent of all land.

It is, nevertheless, not on the agenda of any of the major political parties to change this state of affairs for the simple reason that land or property ownership in itself is not the key to a reasonable standard of living.

The most important thing for the poor in South Africa is not owning land or buildings but having a secure roof over their heads and not having to fear eviction.

Much progress has been made on this front in recent years, although a visit to many of the new low-cost housing areas would be a shock for most white people, as the houses are not only very small, rudimentary and often badly built, but the new housing areas are already overcrowded and showing every sign of developing into the slums of the future.

The problem of the severe imbalances in wealth in the country can only be solved long term by far higher standards of education and better employment prospects.

The huge deficits in these two areas are not, however, solely the fault of the government but result from the huge explosion in the population in recent years. Between 1950 and 2010 the population of South Africa increased by over 250 percent, from just under 14 million to just under 50 million. By comparison, the equivalent figures for some other (non-African) countries are 20 percent in the UK, 28 percent in Sweden, 32 percent in France and about 100 percent in the US.

It’s only thanks to efficient farming in South Africa that this population explosion did not lead to mass starvation. How dangerous it would now be to put this at risk by large-scale redistribution of agricultural land. A quick glance across the border to Zimbabwe tells its own story.

The two articles by professors Gutto and Teffo make it clear that they believe the land should be returned to what they regard as its rightful owners, namely “natives and/or aborigines”.

I assume this to mean that only those with the right pigmentation and presumably this also includes the descendants of those tribes that entered South Africa from the north and dispossessed the original occupiers, the San.

Of course this leads to the question, who are the rightful owners of the land?

There is no satisfactory answer to this question, since most land all over the world was long ago taken away by force from the original occupiers, as humans spread out across the world in one wave after another. The world would descend into chaos if all land occupied today by the descendants of people who took land by force from others had to return it to the descendants of the first settlers. However, despite the fact that Gutto and Teffo’s reasoning is philosophically flawed, I can well understand the frustration of black South Africans that most land is owned by whites.

Perhaps there would be more agitation in England to change ownership patterns if the 1 percent that owned 70 percent of all land had different skin pigmentation.

At the same time, if all South Africans were well-off, not too many people would be worried about an imbalance in land ownership.

Unfortunately, in the present situation it is only too easy to obtain support for wholesale land redistribution, and perhaps even changes in the right to own land privately, by promoting these ideas with flawed arguments.

More could be achieved by providing more and better housing for the poor and homeless than spending millions on land redistribution.

Additional money for housing could perhaps come from a small levy on the capital value of land, similar to the charge put on West German land after World War II to provide compensation to those Germans who lost their property in the eastern German territories that were given to Germany’s neighbours.

For space reasons I will refrain from commenting in detail on the many ideologically slanted views in both articles, such as what the authors describe as the “mythical” willing seller, winning buyer concept for compensation (a globally well-established and widely used value concept) , the majority of land not being owned by the “natives” (how long does one have to live somewhere to be a native?) or the invitation to “Africans” (presumably once more of only one particular skin colour) “to participate in the creation of a… new world order” that is Afrocentric (no doubt particularly attractive to the Chinese and Indians).

IOL