Reap What You Sow: Liberalization and Land Redistribution in South Africa

• In Event: Comparative Political Economy of Food

Abstract

Grain farming has been linked to the historical development of states as it is easier to extract revenues from a crop that is easily stored. In this paper, I posit that grain farming in the contemporary era plays a different role when it comes to state power and development. I focus on the case of South Africa, where the state has attempted to redistribute land to empower Black South Africans in the post-apartheid period. The grain sector remains an outlier in the market-based redistribution program as grain farmers have largely opted not to sell their land for redistribution. I argue that one must understand the role of grain farming within democratic politics to understand these land reform outcomes.

In South Africa, the once white dominated and once well-funded and heavily protected grain sector quickly liberalized upon the transition from apartheid to majority rule in the 1990s to avoid taxation by a new government that did not represent the sector's interests. Thus, the newly democratic state had few levers to compel white farmers to sell their land to Black farmers. Instead, white farmers privatized cooperatives and consolidated land within pre-existing and racialized networks to respond to the new pressures of international marketing, pricing and competition.

In addition to newly liberalized tariff and price mechanisms, the sector has processor-dominated institutions. These decentralized institutions mean that there is minimal collective capacity amongst grain farmers to organize to sell land to redistribution beneficiaries. Instead, each farmer had to adapt quickly with minimal state or sector-led support. The decentralized nature of the sector has a further implication for Black grain farmers: when they do receive grain land, they are faced with an increasingly expensive sector and minimal state or sectoral sources of support.

I use semi-structured interviews, spatial data and historical economic trends to demonstrate how processes of liberalization, internationalization and land consolidation have priced the state and Black farmers out of much of the country's grain land. My findings first call attention to the importance of crop-related factors in a number of policy arenas, but also shows how the relationship between the political economy of a crop and its biological characteristics are mediated by institutional factors and the political development of the commodity sector. In this case, the changing nature of grain farmers' relationship to the state and power dynamics within the commodity sector were serious obstacles to redistribution efforts in a transitional democracy. Second, my findings further illuminate the intersection of race and the political economy of agriculture.

Author

• Alex Dyzenhaus, University of Cape Town