Game farm conversions and the land question: unpacking present contradictions and historical continuities in farm dwellers' tenure insecurity in Cradock

This article addresses farm workers and farm dwellers' tenure insecurity and its relationship with farm conversions in the agricultural district of Cradock, located in the Eastern Cape Karoo. It argues that consequences of farm conversions for farm workers/dwellers' tenure security must be understood within the context of regional land and labour histories. Its main contention with existing positions that ‘blame’ farm conversions for increased evictions and an efflux of workers/dwellers from farms is that there is a correlative rather than causative relationship between farm conversions and farm worker/dweller displacements in the semi-arid areas. It argues that the extreme nature of the historical land question and the continued dominance of a historically white land-owning class in the semi-arid areas render farm workers/dwellers structurally vulnerable to having their residential arrangements on farms terminated at any given moment. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Cradock between 2009 and 2011, the article shows that game farm conversions tend to perpetuate existing land and power relations on farms as they have prevailed over time. However, it also argues that the distinctiveness of game farm conversions lies in their near ‘irreversibility’ as a land use form which creates more permanently securitised and sealed-off pockets of consolidated land in the countryside. These transformations increase the erosion of farm workers/dwellers' embedded social histories and cultural imprint as a labouring class on the landscape.     

An anatomy of dispossession: post-apartheid land rights and farm dweller relocation in the context of a private game reserve initiative,northern KwaZulu-Natal

This article is a detailed examination of the impact that the development of a private game reserve initiative in northern KwaZulu-Natal had on the lives of farm dwellers in the late 1990s. The reshaping of this landscape for ecotourism purposes – a decision taken by a group of private landowners – meant that the residents of the former cattle farms were relocated, a process which had serious consequences for them. The outcomes of relocation from the farms are explored through conversations with the relocated farm dwellers. In an attempt to convey the texture of the emotional geography of dispossession, we document both the tangible and the less tangible losses suffered from the farm dwellers' point of view, as well as their experience with the state bureaucracy. The legal and bureaucratic process leading up to the relocation is then retraced through court documents and other archival evidence. At one level, this case raises questions about the capacity of the post-apartheid South African land reform programme to secure the land rights of marginalised groups such as farm dwellers, despite legislation passed to protect them. At a deeper level, this article is about the conceptual inadequacies of the law. While the law finds it easy to render visible and to protect (saleable) private property, it struggles to fully recognise more complex land relationships. The people whose experience is described in this article felt disempowered, their lives effectively invisible. We problematise the continuing primacy of private property in post-apartheid South Africa and argue that the voices of those with other histories on the land should receive more serious attention.     

Private game farming and its social consequences in post-apartheid South Africa: contestations over wildlife,property and agrarian futures

Spaces of privatised wildlife production, in the form of game farms, private nature reserves and other forms of wildlife-oriented land use, are an increasingly prominent feature of the South African countryside. Whilst there is a well-developed literature on the social impacts of state-run protected areas, the outcomes of privatised wildlife production have thus far received little attention. It is argued here that the socio-spatial dynamics of the wildlife industry, driven by capitalist imperatives related to the commodified production of nature and ‘wilderness’, warrant both in-depth investigation in their own right, and contextualisation in terms of broader processes of agrarian change locally as well as globally. The growing influence of trophy hunting and the wildlife industry on private land can be seen as a significant contributing factor to processes of deagrarianisation that are mirrored in other parts of the African continent and elsewhere. In South Africa, these developments and their impacts on the livelihoods of farm dwellers take on an added dimension in the context of the country's efforts to implement a programme of post-apartheid land reform. Two decades after the formal end of apartheid, contestations over land rights and property ownership remain live and often unresolved. This theme issue explores these dynamics on private land partly or wholly dedicated to wildlife production, with special emphasis on two South African provinces: KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.     

Safe-guarding the colonial present: game farms on the frontier in KwaZulu-Natal's ‘Battlefields Route’

Drawing on Alistair Fraser's concept of the ‘colonial present’, I show how private game farms are both conceptualised and deployed to maintain ideas of boundaries and belonging that sustain colonial ideals and identities. This article is located on the banks of the Mzinyathi River in KwaZulu-Natal, a river that has functioned as a boundary between various groups for almost two hundred years. The game farms located in this area conserve the idea of the river as a frontier space for ‘white’ South Africa and a boundary with ‘black’ South Africa, as well as entrenching their own boundaries through the imagination and realisation of an idealised space. I argue that the game farms safeguard and perpetuate a colonial present whilst obscuring opportunities for other ways of interpreting and using the space of the farm. Ultimately, how the game farms are now imagined and the way they operate is counterproductive to social transformation in the rural landscape.     

The Politics of Land Acquisition in Haryana: Managing Dominant Caste Interests in the Name of Development

ABSTRACT

Anti-Special Economic Zone (SEZ) mobilisation in Haryana failed to generate a mass movement. This is despite the political strength of farmers and their deep resentment of the government’s policy to build up land reserves for industrial purposes. This article argues that there are two main reasons for this outcome. First, the state government put in place a series of significant policies to compensate landowners and give them a stake in the industrial project, primarily through payment of an “annuity.” Second, the main anti-SEZ movements were led by dominant landowning castes who did not incorporate the concerns of landless labourers and tenant farmers who faced equally or even more dire consequences from the government’s land acquisition policy. Moreover, mobilisation relied on traditional caste institutions such as khap panchayats and farmer unions strongly associated with Jats, rather than adopting a more broad-based approach. Entrenched caste animosity and pre-existing conflicts of interest between landed Jats and Dalits, who have traditionally worked as agricultural labourers, further explain the limited scope of the mobilisation among rural groups. The analysis underscores how hierarchical relations shape social movements, define the claims they make and ultimately impact their effectiveness.     

The fractured state in the governance of private game farming: the case of KwaZulu-Natal Province,South Africa

Conversion from livestock and/or crop farming to game farming has been a notable trend on privately owned land in South Africa over the last decades. The rapid growth of wildlife ranching is associated with an annual increase in the areas enclosed by game fences and high demand for wildlife which is being traded privately and at wildlife auctions. Key environmental, agricultural and land reform legislation has been passed since 1994 that impacts this sector, but this legislation does not provide a clear regulatory framework for the game farming industry. This article seeks to understand why game farming is thriving in a regulatory environment plagued with uncertainty. The focus is on one province, KwaZulu-Natal. It is clear that the state is not a homogeneous and monolithic entity applying itself to the regulation of the sector. There is no clear direction on the position of private game farming at the interface of environmental and agricultural regulations. The argument put forward is that the fractured state, in fact, provides space within which the game farmers are able to effectively manoeuvre and to maximise their advantages as private landowners. While game farmers may complain about strict wildlife regulation in the province, the benefits they gain from the combination of a divided state and the presence in this province of a strong, autonomous conservation body are considerable.     

Brazil's Agrarian Reform: Democratic Innovation or Oligarchic Exclusion Redux?

The government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) redistributed a surprising amount of land to Brazil's landless. Assessing that reform, this study argues that an adequate appreciation of land redistribution must transcend the debate about the number of beneficiaries and place the reform in the larger context of state policies toward land and agriculture. It then asks to what extent such policies under Cardoso represented the dismantling of past state practices in the countryside. Although the Cardoso administration enacted some significant and democratizing changes, it missed other opportunities to benefit the rural poor, and its policies essentially maintained the agricultural model of the past two decades.     

Socio-economic differentiation in the post-communist rural Baltics: the case of three kolkhozes

This paper uses longitudinal quantitative data to examine socio-economic differentiation in the rural Baltic areas after decollectivization. It argues that the rural social structure in the post-Soviet Baltics is best determined by two criteria: source of income (income from farming entrepreneurship or income from salaries) and land holdings. Four rural groups are identified: people getting their main income from farming can be differentiated into large landowners engaged in the commercial production of agricultural goods and people with small or medium-sized farms; and people earning their main income from wages can be separated into people with no farming activities and people who are still keeping small or medium-sized farms. The paper also finds that the importance of farming activities in the countryside decreases while importance of wage income tends to increase.     

A fissure in ‘unanimous democracy’: parliamentary contestations over property rights on land in early Republican Turkey

The parliamentary politics of Turkey's one-party regime (1925–1946) has been described as a ‘unanimous democracy’, particularly on account of the absence of a voting opposition. Many scholars consider the Law for Providing Land to Farmers of 1945 as the first instance of parliamentary opposition in the one-party legislature. The current article challenges this widespread view and argues that property rights on land tended to provoke backlashes even before 1945. It examines the making of the deportation, land distribution and settlement laws of the 1920s and 1930s, all of which sanctioned intervention into property relations on land in the form of the expropriation of landowners. Going beyond an exclusive focus on voting patterns, this article traces parliamentary resistance by examining how government bills changed as they proceeded through both the reviewing committees and the general assembly. It links the birth of a full-fledged parliamentary opposition in 1945 to the previous waves of discontent and shows that property rights on land was a constant fissure in the early Republic's unanimous democracy.     

Frontier Capitalism: Agrarian Expansion in Southern Chile,c. 1890–1930

This article argues that the agrarian expansion that took place in Chile's southern frontier region after the military occupation of the Mapuche territory (1862–1883) was the first phase of the development of agrarian capitalism in the region. This process was shaped by ecological conditions. In a territory covered by forests, sharecropping with tenant labourers was crucial for land clearance in the formation of the hacienda system, when landowners needed to create fields for commercial crops. As the domestic demand for agricultural products increased, mechanisation intensified, sharecropping declined, and wage labour became dominant. Frontier capitalist agriculture expanded dramatically, and consequently the region became the breadbasket of Chile.     

UNESCO and the politics of cultural heritage in Tibet

This article examines United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) cultural heritage policies and Chinese state-directed tourism policies in contemporary Tibet. It begins with a brief overview of the tourism industry in Tibet, and moves to a discussion of UNESCO's focus on the preservation of world cultural sites in the name of universal values, noting how this aids state claims to authority over culture as a tool in state-building in places such as Tibet and Indonesia. The article then examines the effects state tourism policies have had on specific Tibetan sites, based on field visits to Lhasa and Shigatse in 2001 and 2002 and Xiahe (Gansu Province) in 2004.

In a word, the Potala Palace, as a world cultural heritage and a place of religious activities, has drawn the attention of the world. With the deepening of the reform, opening and modermization drive and along with the implementation of the going-west strategy, the Potala Palace has become a treasure of the world. - Potala Palace Management Office (2002)     

Centralized planning and economic reforms in a mountainous region of Vietnam

This study contributes to an understanding of the diversity of agrarian systems in the mountainous regions of northern Vietnam. By examining over 100 small family farms, we identified the major changes in production systems that have occurred over the last 50 years. Access to land, population migration, and individual initiative were the three major factors driving household differentiation. State policies had substantial impacts on all three factors, making the State the key driving force of differentiation. After years of central planning, farmers are now free to make their own choices as they interact with their new environment: the market economy.

Effective farmers' organizations need to be established to provide farmers with the information and decision-making tools they need to adjust their production to fit the market. Somewhere between State control and total independence, community-based natural resource management schemes are needed to ensure that small family farms in the isolated mountainous areas are sustainable in the face of ineluctable macroeconomic changes.     

Private Farming in Russia: An Emerging Success?

The emergence of privately owned peasant farms in the early 1990s was one of the most important reforms in Russia's agrarian sector. Initially failing to become a significant food producer, during its second decade private farming emerged as a success in agrarian reform. This success is analyzed using two levels of analysis. At the macro-level, economic performance, government policy, and AKKOR's relationships with a range of actors are examined. The micro- or household level is examined using survey data from rural households, looking at private farmers' earned income, land holdings, and shifts in employment.     

Agrarian transformation in the Russian breadbasket: contemporary trends as manifest in Stavropol'

A team of US and Russian geographers combines field observations with satellite imagery in an examination of how major trends in Russian agriculture are manifest in one of Russia's most productive agricultural regions: Stavropol' Kray. A nationwide pattern of agricultural consolidation during the 1990s (featuring rural depopulation and a reduction in cultivated area and herd sizes upon the termination of Soviet-era subsidization levels) has had decidedly different outcomes in different parts of the vast Russian countryside. This paper – using Stavropol' as a surrogate for regions which by physical attributes, location, and human capital are best positioned to support agricultural activity – identifies a number of developments that may signal a new growth trajectory for agriculture in Russia: evolving specialization of former socialized farms in response to market conditions (in Stavropol' involving the shrinkage of animal husbandry and the release of surplus labor); increased levels of absentee (corporate) ownership of farmland in the more favorable locations; decoupling of the economic fate of large farms (success) from local municipal budgets (deficiency); and the expansion of non-Russian ethnic communities in the countryside, with attendant land use changes.     

Mining with a ‘Vuvuzela’: reconfiguring artisanal mining in Southern Zimbabwe and its implications to rural livelihoods

The rural landscape of Zimbabwe has dramatically changed in the last decade. Zimbabwe inherited a racially biased land ownership pattern at independence in 1980 and 20 years on efforts by the state to address the colonial land imbalances have been largely unsuccessful. In 2000 the Zimbabwe government embarked on a controversial rapid land redistribution exercise that saw vast tracts of land previously owned by white commercial farmers taken over and distributed to mostly black Zimbabweans. Some authors have argued that there is no single story of the Fast Track Land Reform and Resettlement programme because of the myths and realities spread by the media. It is important to note that what happened in one province might not be similar to the other. Rural dwellers in the countryside had for years depended on agrarian livelihoods and the fact that more land had been availed by the state meant better livelihoods. However, this article argues that in spite of a widened horizon to pursue agrarian activities many people have actually drifted away from on-farm to off-farm livelihoods. This is true in the case of southern Zimbabwe where a large number of rural dwellers have chosen artisanal gold mining as a pathway in realising a livelihood. This article therefore focuses on the expansion of artisanal gold mining in southern Zimbabwe; particularly in southern Matabeleland. Using fieldwork as a method of data gathering, the article unravels the development of artisanal mining in this region and how it has been reconfigured after the hosting of the Soccer World Cup in South Africa 2010. In particular it shows how the metal detector technology (the Vuvuzela) availed by the hosting of the Soccer World Cup has found its way to the region and changed the gold panning process. Conclusions drawn from a detailed PhD study revealed that a significant number of southern Zimbabwe gold panners have adopted the metal detector technology as a way of expanding their trade.     

Land reforms in Pakistan: A reconsideration

Abstract

Before the introduction of the high yielding varieties of food grain in the late 1960s the argument for land reform was a simple one. It was observed that small farms had a higher yield per acre than large farms, so it was argued that a re-distribution of owned land in favor of the smaller farmers would improve average yields in agriculture. Hence land reforms were considered advisable both on grounds that they would reduce the degree of inequality of rural incomes, as well as on grounds of efficiency. The efficiency argument for land reforms in Pakistan gathered momentum in the 1950s when agricultural stagnation began to fetter the growth of industry. Agriculture provided not only food grains for the rising urban population but also provided most of the foreign exchange with which industrial machinery and raw materials were imported. Accordingly, slow agricultural growth generated both a crisis in the balance of payments as well as food shortages in the urban sector. In such a situation even the technocrats who were merely interested in the growth of GNP joined the cry of the social reformers for a land reform. It began to be seen as a necessary instrument for accelerating agricultural growth and thereby releasing the constraint on industrial growth.     

The Societal Consequences of Market Reform in Peru

This article analyzes how market reform policies already in place affect social interests, and the feedback effects of those interests on reform processes. The variety of societal responses includes the creation of new societal organizations, reflecting the variable content and asymmetrical distribution of costs and benefits of the policies implemented. Because of this variety even in Peru, where the disorganizing effects of neoliberal reform appear to be strongest, it would seem that the societal impact of economic reform elsewhere in Latin America would also warrant more careful examination.     

Foreign investment,black economic empowerment and militarised patronage politics in Zimbabwe

This paper seeks to analyse Zimbabwe's economic empowerment policy. It argues that while there is a felt need for Zimbabwe to redress colonially induced injustices and racial imbalances in the ownership of the means of production, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the indigenisation of the economy is fundamentally flawed as it deters investors and may further damage the country's already extremely fragile economy. The implementation of the land reform programme contributed to the decline of Zimbabwe's economy: lessons learnt from the programme and related economic policies of the past 15 years highlight the problems of empowerment policies that are intertwined with patronage politics. The government's negation of basic economic principles and failure to open spaces for critical engagement with all relevant stakeholders epitomises an ill-advised indigenisation and economic empowerment strategy. The policy will not promote and retain foreign investment;nor are there sustainable prospects of internally oriented accumulation strategies on the horizon.     

Empire,State and the Bedouin of the Middle East,Past and Present: A Comparative Study of Land and Settlement Policies

The Bedouin of the Middle East have been one of the region's most marginalized groups in modern times. This study assesses the interplay between state policies and the Bedouin in the last 150 years, from a comparative standpoint. We examine the development of land laws in the Middle East as they have affected the Bedouin, from the enactment of the Ottoman land laws of 1858 up to the present. Moreover we explore whether the land laws and the fate of the Bedouin are associated with the characteristics of the regime in each country. We find that the imposition of land laws and policies directed at nomadic and sedentarizing Bedouins has depended on disparate factors such as the origins of the leadership of countries (i.e. Bedouin or non-Bedouin) and the social and economic models embraced. Regimes with origins in the tribal-Bedouin fabric of the Middle East have pursued land policies that were favorable to the Bedouin, whereas regimes drawing their strength from urban elites and with socialist outlooks encouraged very different policies. We also consider whether the case of the Bedouin in Israel is unique or reflects a larger regional context.     

Struggles for land and livelihood

Abstract

Scholars, policy practitioners, and political activists alike have had difficulty grappling with the complex dynamics that have unfolded over the past decade and a half in Philippine banana plantations in the context of the 1988 agrarian reform law. While some focus their attention exclusively on land redistribution issues, others concentrate on the modalities of contract farming and still others emphasize trade union issues — all to the neglect of underlying agrarian dynamics. Relatively few have attempted a more integrated examination of developments in this sector of the Philippine economy. The still-limited availability of studies of land-reform-related experiences in agribusiness plantations outside the Philippines further constrains our understanding of the issues arising in Philippine plantations. This article tries to build on and deepen previous attempts at understanding the complex and confusing dynamics involving the banana elite, the state, and various segments of organized farmworkers and to fill in an important gap in the literature, using an integrated, rights-based, and process-oriented historical-institutional approach. It cites two reasons for an unexpectedly contingent land reform process in commercial banana farms in the Philippines: (1) the surprisingly unsettled character of the prevailing political-legal institutional environment within which land and livelihood struggles are playing out, and (2) the diverse perceptions among farmworkers of the meaning and purpose of, and opportunity for, land reform.