Who should be the primary beneficiaries of redistributive land reform in South Africa, and how will land redistribution contribute to the reduction of rural poverty? Fifteen years after the transition to democracy, these remain controversial and contested questions. Despite its poor performance to date, and concern over low levels of production on redistributed or restored land, there is little sign of land reform being abandoned by the ruling party, the African National Congress. The powerful symbolic resonance of the ‘land question’ means that it remains high on the political agenda of post-apartheid South Africa. Recently, however, there has been renewed debate on the economic rationales for land redistribution, with a particular focus on poverty reduction, employment and economic restructuring. At least at the level of rhetoric, the primary beneficiaries of land reform are now, as in 1994/95, being identified as ‘the rural poor’ and ‘small-scale farmers’, or ‘smallholders’, rather than the ‘emerging commercial farmers’ that government policy was fixated on under the Mbeki presidency.

 

But what is a smallholder? In this paper I argue that the term is problematic because it tends to obscure inequalities and significant class-based differences within the large population of households engaged in agricultural production on a relatively small scale. Much usage suggests that smallholders form a relatively homogeneous group, and fails to distinguish between producers for whom:

 

I also suggest that the term ‘smallholder’ does not facilitate analysis of the dynamics of differentiation within populations of small farmers (i.e. the causal processes through which inequalities emerge), and draws attention away from internal tensions within households (often gender-based) over the use of land, labour and capital. Furthermore, it can misdirect the formulation of land and agrarian reform policies aimed at addressing structural inequality, and result in misleading emphases on common interests in attempts to organize and mobilize small-scale farmers, when divergent (class and gender) interests, together with other forms of social differentiation, present real obstacles to such attempts.

 

The term ‘smallholder’ does have a certain degree of descriptive power, when it is qualified by adjectives such as ‘semi-subsistence’, ‘semi-commercial’, or ‘commercially oriented’. These sub-categories do indicate at least some key between different households and production units and their associated farming systems, if somewhat imprecisely. The key indicators implicit in these sub-categorizations are scale of production and extent of marketed surplus. But this typology is much less useful when seeking explanations of differences and their underlying dynamics.

 

I argue that a class-analytic perspective on small-scale informed by materialist political economy, and centred on the key concepts of ‘petty commodity production’ and ‘accumulation from below’, is essential for understanding the differentiated character and diverse trajectories of small-scale agriculture within capitalism. The paper explores the policy implications of such a class-analytic approach, and proposes that land and agrarian reform should aim to support a broadly-based process of ‘accumulation from below’, in combination with supporting supplementary food production on ‘garden’ plots and fields by large numbers of rural (and peri-urban) households, in order to enhance their food security and reduce income poverty. It argues that a differentiated population of producers requires appropriately differentiated policies – as well as a politics of land that build on a explicit recognition of incipient class differences within the ranks of the ‘poor and landless’[1].

---