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**Human Rights Monitor **
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Why Do The Landless Remain Landless?
November 10, 2005
This is an examination of land acquisition and the extent to which the land market and land redistribution mechanisms serve the needs of land-seeking people in South Africa.
| Susan Tilley |
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| Surplus People Project (SPP) |
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The history of landownership in South Africa paints a picture of racially-based dispossession and extreme racial, class and gender inequality. It manifests itself in extensive and profound landlessness and socio-economic hardship and poverty. This legacy has resulted in a skewed landownership profile and the lack of redress to significantly overcome this tragic history is contributing to an erosion of the meaning and substance of South Africa’s ten year old democracy.
In working towards the restoration of rights to land within a democratic framework, land sector support agencies such as Surplus People Project (SPP) have increasingly found that their ability to assist rural people in their quest for land is thwarted and that landless men and women are repeatedly confronted by obstacles that prevent them from acquiring land. This research study sets out to examine and explain some of the reasons for this state of affairs and to establish whether the land market and associated land redistribution programmes are providing landless people with the land that they seek. In addition to considering local case studies and the experience of rural dwellers in their struggle to acquire land, lessons are drawn from experiences of land reform elsewhere, notably from Brazil, Zimbabwe and the Philippines. These are incorporated into the research study and its proposals on how land acquisition and the ownership and control over the South African rural landscape can be altered and made more equitable.
The lived experiences of rural people’s attempts to acquire land in the arid regions of Namaqualand and the Hantam Karoo, and in the better-resourced West Coast of the Western Cape, starkly expose the nature of the challenges faced by landless people and the agencies that wish to support them in their struggle. Each of their stories tells a different tale but with a shared and constant refrain – exclusion from the land market due to a lack of available land, a lack of financial resources, and a lack of support.
It is insufficient to simply describe these situations and relate the stories told by the members of these landless communities and emerging farmer associations. We need to interrogate why the obstacles appear insurmountable, why the old landownership patterns persist and thus why they remain landless. In doing so, it is necessary to reflect on the aims and methodologies of land reform in the post-1994 period and to consider the purpose of these reforms, and then to see whether the espoused aims have been met, and if not, why this is the case.
The aims of land reform in the post-1994 era were to be realized within the context of constitutional protection for private property, and the need to placate and address the needs of interest groups such as existing landowners, traditional leaders, local and international investors, and business interests, while at the same time not abandoning the needs and desires of the majority of South Africans. The adopted framework that best suited the State’s neo-liberal approach, and one that is advocated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, was thus a market-driven approach where the principle of the willing seller/willing buyer was to govern the form, pace and scope of land reform. Within this approach, the land market becomes the central determinant and mechanism for the redistribution of land.
It cannot however be assumed that the recognition and use of the land market and a reliance on market forces as the modality for redistributing land is axiomatic, universally accepted, or uncontested. The paper explores what is meant by the term “the land market” and unravels the history of how and why South Africa adopted a market-based approach to land reform and how this phenomenon has become such a prominent feature of land reform and development in this country.
The South African state appears to have adopted a notion of the land market as portrayed by the neo-classical school of economics – that markets are “inert intermediaries between mutually benefiting transacting parties” and that they are “inherently accessible, that access is free and that markets automatically allocate opportunities” to all groupings in society. However, a closer examination reveals that the land market cannot be viewed simply as a neutral, apolitical mechanism for the transferring of land between sellers and buyers but that it is in fact an inherently complex and dynamic site of struggle between unequal partners that implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, serves particular vested interests and needs, while excluding others.
The paper argues that, rather than seeing markets as neutral, fair and apolitical institutions, we should rather understand markets as dynamic sets of formal and informal relationships and norms – or what North describes as ‘the rules of the game’ - that inform the manner in which people access and interact with the market, and which govern the parameters of this site of struggle and contestation over land.
This motif forms the nub of this study and shows that land reform beneficiaries as a category of willing buyers are largely excluded from the land market and are constrained in their ability to purchase land using land grants. While it is evident that South Africa has an active land market in certain areas of the country, this arena is not accessible to the majority of landless people for a range of reasons that are varied and complex but which have had the net effect of maintaining the unequal racial profile of landownership.
Having outlined the focus and design of the research study in Part One of this paper, Part two paints a broad-brush picture of current land reform policy and practice, and explores the factors that serve to enable or retard land acquisition by landless people – the fulcrum being the land market, on which all current land policy is balanced. The scope for landless people to acquire land is affected by the prominence and role of the land market, and the balance of forces within this site of contestation. The key functional requirements for the land market to operate, as advocated by its proponents, are set out and the performance of the market is measured in terms of its own requirements as well as its responsiveness to the needs of the landless in relation to these. In the process of assessing the land market’s performance and its appropriateness as the central vehicle of land reform, landownership patterns and the various land reform laws, policies and mechanisms are examined.
In order for the land market to operate, key functional requirements need to be in place. These requirements are accompanied by a range of assumptions that have developed as the land market has emerged in various contexts and have been shaped by the various forms of state, associational and social power that impact on them. Over time, the requirements for functionality and the assumptions which underpin them have been adopted, and have been defined and promoted by proponents of the market. It is these requirements and assumptions which the paper addresses and against which the performance of the market is measured and critiqued.
Within the land market’s own frame of reference for functionality, the following elements are assumed to be required and present:
A product or commodity for exchange – and in this instance, land – must exist
Interactions and relationships of negotiation and exchange exist within the sphere of the market. These interactions assume that:
• Buyers, sellers and intermediaries are equal ‘partners’.
• Buyers, sellers and intermediaries are ‘reliable’ and a level of trust exists.
• A requisite level of activity in the land market must be present. This assumes a sub-set of requirements that includes the availability of the commodity of land being transacted.
• The market must be accessible and open to all who wish to engage in it. This consequently implies that information must be available to all.
• Willing buyers have the wherewithal to purchase commodities in the market and have access to ready capital and finance for the purchase of land.
• A regulatory framework exists – this includes the regulation of land prices, an established mechanism for determining the value of land, an enforcement of property rights, and a defined role for institutions such as the state in relation to the market.
Each requirement and its related assumptions are considered in turn and the findings of the research study are discussed and matched in relation to these requirements, and their resultant effects on land-seeking rural people and emerging farmers in particular. Concluding comments are then made about each requirement and its performance as well as impact. Although not constituting an isolated or discrete component of the market and as such in reality involving a great deal of overlap in terms of function and effect, for the purposes of this study each requirement is treated separately.
The first assumption in relation to the land market - a product or commodity of exchange is present – is examined. The paper argues that the commodification and concomitant privatisation of land negates the multiple values many rural people place on land. This has meant that only those who can afford to purchase this commodity are able to benefit from its use - thus placing resource-poor and landless people outside the sphere of accessing or acquiring land in the interests of improving their livelihoods and contributing to the economy.
The sub-section dealing with the assumption about the existence and nature of interactions of negotiation and exchange analysis the extent to which there are willing sellers and buyers. It also explores the unequal social relations between these groupings and how these interactions impact on transactions, and result in the marginalisation of many willing buyers.
The assumption about the requisite level of activity and the availability of land, explores the profile of land ownership, the availability of land, and factors that contribute to land availability and levels of market activity. In doing so, transactions of non-purchased and purchased land are examined, as are reasons offered by landowners for selling their land.
In examining levels of market activity, an analysis is undertaken of actual land transactions in the land market over a five-year period for the specified case study sample locations and reveals a relatively high level of activity, with 1841 transactions for a total of 2 027 848 hectares having been transacted at a total price of R793,919,252. However, given that 22% of the total transactions for this period were for non-purchased land (for example, inherited estates), only 78% of all transactions can be viewed as land that was potentially available on the market for acquisition by others, be they new entrants into the market, prospective land reform beneficiaries or existing landowners.
A total of 58% of all transactions involved the acquisition of land by existing landowners, and estates alone accounted for 291564 ha, or 14% of the total land area transacted. The 225 transactions involving estates equal 12% of the total number of land transactions. It thus becomes clear that the level of land accumulation and concentration in the hands of the existing landowners and their families is very high.
The assumption that the market is accessible and information is available to all is scrutinized and a profile of land buyers is developed in relation to the sustained accumulation and concentration of land. The conclusion drawn here is that the market is an overwhelmingly internal one and that access to information is segmented and truncated. Much of the available land for sale is in fact transacted through an internal market based on word of mouth and through a network of “insiders”, thereby further closing out new entrants and prospective land reform beneficiaries.
A fundamental assumption about the land market is that ready capital and finance is available for purchasing land. However, the study outlines how uneven the access to capital and finance is, and the extent to which financial institutions and those offering formal credit tend to discriminate against those who are not viewed as being credit-worthy. A brief examination of the involvement of banks and financial houses as landholders is undertaken.
The last assumption - the existence of a regulatory framework - is examined with particular reference to the role of the state and institutions in regulating the land market, and the ways in which land value, price and valuation act as regulatory factors in the market.
Having explored a range of assumptions about the functional requirements of the land market, Section 8 considers the key land redistribution programmes and mechanisms and the extent to which these enable or retard the acquisition of land by the landless. Here the Municipal Commonage Programme and the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme are examined.
Having identified and problematised the shortcomings of the land market and the current land redistribution programmes, the paper offers some strategic proposals in the form of alternative approaches for improving land acquisition. These include ways in which the land market could be reformed and made more equitable. In addition, the more comprehensive use of the mechanisms of expropriation and sub-division within the context of a planned approach is proposed. Central to any improved modus operandi for land reform is the need for a more planned approach – in this regard a district or area-based approach is advocated.
In conclusion, the adoption of the land market as the central tenet of the government’s approach to land reform, and the portrayal of the market as a neutral institution serving the needs of all those who wish to engage in it, has been scrutinised and found wanting. The lack of available land on the open market, compounded by unequal social relations in the countryside and the historically-shaped attitudes of commercial farmers towards releasing their land for land reform purposes has resulted in very few land reform transactions having taken place. This situation has been compounded by the Department of Land Affairs’ lack of preparedness to actively challenge the status quo of landownership patterns or to reconsider its policies, procedures and timeframes in a bid to acquire more land for the landless as evidenced by the unpreparedness to utilise the mechanism of expropriation.
The study emphasises that markets are neither “inert intermediaries between mutually benefiting transacting parties” nor “inherently accessible” to all groupings in society. The land market cannot be viewed simply as a neutral, apolitical mechanism for the transferring of land between sellers and buyers but must be seen as a complex and dynamic set of relations that serves particular vested interests and needs while excluding others. This understanding of the market therefore demonstrates that landless people and emerging farmers have limited, if any, access to land markets and gain very little from engaging in it.
It is evident that the land market as it is currently constituted is essentially a closed circuit that remains the preserve of the few who are capital and information-resourced, and who are part of the network of landowners who understand and determine the ‘rules of the game’. The reliance on the workings of the market in which the current land owners dominate and the willing seller/buyer principle, is therefore not likely to generate the desired outcomes of a more equitable redistribution of land in South Africa, and will perpetuate the situation of the landless remaining landless.
Full Report::
Why Do The Landless Remain Landless?
144 Word pages
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