Smallholder farms in South Africa

An article that I came across by the Financial Times entitled ‘ ‘We must decolonise water rights for Africa to advance’ stated that the ‘majority of small scale farmers have no legal access to water’. The term ‘legal access to water’ reminded me of the aftermath of the Oslo II Accords which had paved the way for Israel’s, discriminatory water distribution policies meaning that for decades, Palestinians have been denied access to safe and clean water.It was an artificial water scarcity  (e.g. depletion of groundwater resources, inadequate water infrastructure and resource theft)  implemented and engineered by the state of Israel and sustained by military action and the Israeli water company, Mekorot ( Rabi, 2014). Access to water is a fundamental human right and Sustainable development Goal 6- to achieve clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. In this blog post, I will be discussing how a historic class division in South Africa and a ‘failure to fully depart from an apartheid and discriminatory mindset’ ( Shetty, 2017) has had a continuing negative impact on smallholder farmers and hindering development in post-apartheid South Africa. Smallholder farmers are crucial for achieving food security for the continent of Africa ( Conway et al, 2019).

 I have chosen to focus on South Africa as it tends to be described as the most unequal country on earth with an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. Access to water is therefore divided between the haves and have nots  ( Thompson, 2010) and this division is more apparent in rural areas where ‘approximately half the country’s population live’ (Perret, 2002: 284) and there is an ongoing legacy of apartheid.  

One of the main challenges faced by the South African water sector is ‘serving the 11 million rural people (65%) without adequate access to water’ (Webster, 1999: 7) creating issues for irrigation, and subsequently food production.  It has been argued that South Africa’s ‘dualistic agriculture sector’( Kariuki, 2018)  which prioritises agribusiness and large scale farming effectively leaving out smallholder producers, makes the challenges faced by water scarcity more complex. Sanderson (1995) identifies a racial element to this unequal agricultural production arguing ‘South Africa is divided into two different worlds when it comes to agriculture – one is the commercial agricultural sector, by white farmers, and the other is the developing sector of small-scale, disadvantaged farmers’. This dualism in the South African agricultural sector has been deepened by liberalisation and deregulation which began in the final years of apartheid ( Kariuki, 2018), and as they have further disadvantaged small scale and subsistence farmers, I argue in this blog post that these reforms are one of the most important legacies of colonialism in South Africa. For example, the deregulation of markets which resulted in ‘further corporate concentration of agricultural capital’ (Visser and Ferrer, 2015 cited in Kariuki, 2018: 223)  meant that the agriculture value chain became dominated by agribusiness giants, resulting in the inability of smaller farms and enterprises to compete. This links back my earlier point about there being a failure to move on  from discriminatory legacies as small holder farms which tend to be owned by black farmers are unable to compete, because they are ‘historically disadvantaged in terms of experience, skills and networking opportunities’ (Kariuki, 2018: 223). There is an ever-present bias which underpins the agricultural sector further alienating smallholder famers and having an impact on food security overall.

Furthermore, attempts by the South African government to support smallholder farmers have been at best, mediocre. Aliber and Hall (2012:548)  describe these policy objectives and aims introduced by the government during the post-apartheid era to help smallholder black farmers ton ‘expand and commercialise… [as]costly and ineffective’. They remain within a neoliberal framework rather than taking into account that the majority of smallholders own less than two hectares of land and are subsistence farmers concerned with producing enough food to feed their families rather than imitate large scale (white) commercial farmers.