Sweetening the Deal: Sectoral Determinants of Land Redistribution in South Africa

• In Event: Land and Politics in Africa

Abstract

Governments use land redistribution for diverse political ends, like ensuring political support from specific constituencies, achieving justice for past wrongs and combating rural landlessness. Regardless of their political goals, they must navigate a complicated rural institutional landscape peppered with established and strong interest groups. This paper examines the relationship between the organization of agricultural commodity sectors and land redistribution in South Africa’s land reform program, focusing on whether a sector has powerful producers or processors of an agricultural commodity. With stark differences in agricultural organization, how does the local political economy of agriculture affect a state’s attempts to use land reform to bring about national rural change? The question is especially relevant because contemporary land reform relies on market-based programs that require voluntary sales of land from a landholder at accepted values.

In this paper, I argue that the organization of agricultural institutions shapes land redistribution. Markets can either constrain or facilitate redistribution depending on how the actors within them have organized. Institutions that prioritize producer power can provide more barriers to land reform, while processor-centered institutions may be more willing to cooperate with the government to facilitate the process of redistribution. To make this argument, I draw on 30 in-depth interviews and build on the expert knowledge and experience of my respondents: White farmers faced with selling their land, Black farmers attempting to acquire land, sectoral agricultural actors and bureaucrats who oversee the process. Through their accounts, I can better understand the institutional obstacles impeding the policy process and logics under which market and state actors operate. I connect agricultural organization and land redistribution through two mechanisms by developing sub-national, sectoral case studies: the processor-centered sugar and producer-centered grain sectors.

Author

• Alex Dyzenhaus, Cornell University