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The paper provides a survey of commercial agriculture in South Africa since 1994. It
emphasizes, first, how effectively organized agriculture positioned itself for the new dispensation, with the help of the last apartheid government, and, second, the importance of the
removal of limits on the international mobility of South African capital and commodities
imposed on the apartheid regime. The lacunae and ambiguities of the African National
Congress concerning land and agricultural policy during the political transition of 19904
and since then in government are also important here.The paper considers transformation(s)
with respect to farm labour, regulating agribusiness, and land reform, black farming, and
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE, specifically AgriBEE). It concludes that the course of
South African agriculture and agricultural policy since 1994 has done little, if anything, to
transform the circumstances of the dispossessed rural and urban classes of labour whose
crises of social reproduction remain grounded in the inheritances of racialized inequality.
Keywords: agribusiness, capitalist farming, South Africa, transformation
INTRODUCTION
During the negotiated transition from apartheid between 1990 and 1994, the African National
Congress (ANC) had little in the way of economic strategy for the moment it assumed
government office. As one ANC advisor put it at the time: From 1955 until the unbanning of
the ANC in 1990, the economic policy of the ANC remained the same . . . What economic
thinking existed was contained in general documents and manifestos (McMenamin 1992, 245).
This deficit was especially glaring in relation to land and agrarian questions, given the centrality
of dispossession to South African history, the formation of its organized agriculture (standard
code for white farming) and supply of black labour to the countrys farms, mines and factories.
The principal item in the ANCs 1955 Freedom Charter was the distribution of land to the
tiller, declared during the construction of grand apartheid.
Forty years later, agrarian structure had a different shape and, in contrast to the ANC,
organized agriculture had been busily, and effectively, repositioning itself for a post-apartheid
dispensation. One example was a creeping deregulation from the late 1980s or earlier, and
accelerating during the transition from 1990 to 1994, above all to dismantle the different kinds
Henry Bernstein, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University
of London, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: henrybernstein@hotmail.co.uk
I am grateful to Neo Chabane, Mapato Rakhudu and Simon Roberts for permission to cite an unpublished
conference paper and a forthcoming revised version; to Amelia Genis and Ben Cousins for suggesting useful ideas
and sources and for their comments on earlier drafts; and to Bridget OLaughlin, Pauline Peters, Peter Gibbon and
several anonymous referees for their comments; the usual disclaimers apply. The quote in the title borrows from
one of South Africas biggest farmers, Kallie Schoeman of Schoeman Boerdery: It is natural, simply capitalism . . .
you must get bigger, get better, or get out. (Financial Mail, 19 January 2012).
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
24 Henry Bernstein
of commodity-based state marketing schemes, with their administered producer prices and
other forms of subsidy key to the fortunes of white farmers earlier in the period of apartheid.1
Such deregulation was, of course, favoured by the World Bank, which presented itself to fill the
gaping hole of ANC agricultural policy. Another example was the conversion of the biggest
agricultural co-operatives into companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE),
enabling them to reinvent themselves as private agribusiness corporations, in effect. In tandem
with these changes, the South African Agricultural Union (SAAU), that had put much of the
organized into the relations between organized agriculture and the apartheid state, subsequently rebranded itself in 1999 as a colour-blind Agri South Africa (Agri SA) for the new
conditions of the rainbow nation.
What of land reform policies and encouragement of small for which, read black
farmers more generally? This was the gap filled by World Bank prescriptions. Indeed, the 1994
ANC election pledge to redistribute 30 per cent of commercial (white) farmland in 5 years
used the target proposed by the World Bank. Further, the Bank created a convivial connection
with a group at the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) established, as part of late
apartheids reform endeavours, to revive development in the bantustans. A principal emphasis
was to dismantle bantustan agricultural corporations as a step towards freeing up the energies
of small farmers.2 The World Bank, its verligte (enlightened) allies at the DBSA, and the usual
suspects in the ranks of international consultancy, dominated the policy discourses, publications
and proposals of the then ANC think tank, the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre (LAPC)
concerning structural adjustment of agriculture, especially marketing and land reform.
In the conjuncture of transition, two principal reform scenarios were urged on the impending democratic government.3 One was the argument for (orderly) land redistribution and small
farmer development, to which Michael Lipton contributed his authority (Lipton 1996). The
other was provided by the report of the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG), commissioned by the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). MERG
advocated a suitably reformed large farm path of development:
. . . there are immense possibilities for putting economic pressure on farmers, by expanding, eliminating, and redirecting the array of state expenditures and tariffs affecting their
incentives. The purpose of such pressures should be to encourage all farmers to begin to
invest in a wage labour intensive, technologically dynamic and internationally competitive
farm production structure. (MERG 1993, 194)
Technological dynamism and international competitiveness are certainly prominent in the
discourse of government policy and of (re-)organized agriculture some 18 years after the
formal end of apartheid in 1994. Whether agrarian change since then has generated additional
waged jobs is another matter, as is the fate of hopes pinned to small farmer development
effected through land redistribution and other measures (see further below).
This strategic move was combined with others to strengthen (white) commercial agriculture for a postapartheid dispensation. Continuing state support, notably in the form of drought relief from 1983 and culminating in the massive R3.2 billion handout following the 1992 drought, was not so much to assist farmers as those
institutions that held their debt, among which a handful of summer grain co-operatives were pre-eminent. The
fundamental purpose was supporting capital formation by the co-operatives and maintaining land values. Farm
debt grew from R837 million in 1980 to some R16 billion by 1990, the greatest part accounted for by maize
farmers. The collapse of that debt would have had a serious impact on a financial system that was already under
severe strain (Bernstein 2004).
2
In line with earlier World Bank structural adjustment policies elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, in effect.
3
There is more detailed critical discussion of the two scenarios in Bernstein (1998).
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Sugar has a distinctive position in South African agriculture, and remains the only commodity which . . . still
benefits from state-imposed price controls (Hall 2011b, 8).
There have also been some shifts in the spatial distribution of different branches, on which see the following
sections.
26 Henry Bernstein
were under arable cultivation. About 15 million people, roughly half of the African population,
lived in the bantustans on some 14 million hectares, one-sixth of the area fenced by 60,000
white farms.
By 2010, less than 5 per cent of commercial farm land (roughly 4 million hectares) had been
transferred through land reform. According to the Review of Agricultural Policies and Support
Instruments (RSA 2010), part of the Presidency Fifteen Year Review Project, between 2002 and
2006 the number of South African households with access to land for farming purposes
declined by 21 per cent, from 1.8 million to 1.4 million.The relative decline was even greater:
from just over 15 per cent of all South African households to 10.65 per cent, with the largest
losses by those with land parcels of less than one hectare in the former bantustans, now
communal areas (RSA 2010, 23). However, Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 1, 86) note that Establishing
basic facts and figures regarding smallholders is difficult. The Annual Abstract of Agricultural
Statistics . . . has no figures for the numbers of smallholders . . . [nor] for the amount of
agricultural land in the former homelands (. . . where the vast majority of smallholders are
located).6
This means that the numbers of black farmers and the land area that they farm in the former
bantustans remain highly uncertain and contested, subject to radically different assessments in
debates about land reform.
Farming
The 60,000 or so commercial (white) farms of 1994 had reduced to 45,000 by 2002, according
to that years Census of Commercial Agriculture, published in 2005. This suggests a trend of
concentration of landed property that predated 1994 but accelerated in the first decade after the
end of apartheid.7
Table 1 shows that in 2002, 673 farms (1.6 per cent) produced a third of total gross
commercial farm income, and 1,348 farms (5 per cent) more than half.8 The largest enterprises
are generally in areas of high agricultural productivity, and are major field crop producers,
irrigated and export-oriented horticulture enterprises or intensive livestock enterprises. Most
operate on more than one non-contiguous farm and sometimes on rented land too. They are
typically incorporated as companies, and hire specialized management.The third of commercial
farms with a turnover of between R300,000 and R2 million are mostly family owned (though
often incorporated) and family managed; some also rent in land. They are generally extensive
livestock enterprises in drier areas, medium-scale crop producers or smaller irrigated farms.The
50 per cent of commercial farms with a turnover of less than R300,000 belong to part-time
farmers; many of them are weekend farms in peri-urban areas and game ranches, so-called
lifestyle farms.9
Technical, organizational and spatial changes in commercial farming manifest the combined
effects of growing farm concentration, the removal of former subsidy and other support
mechanisms (including pan-territorial pricing for grains) and trade liberalization. The
6
They prefer to construct their estimates of numbers of smallholders from data in the annual Labour Force
Surveys; see their Appendix 2: Overview of secondary statistical sources and their advantages and disadvantages,
and further below.
7
More recently, the Financial Mail (19 January 2012) gave a figure of 37,000 commercial farms, and cited a
prediction by the General Manager for Agribusiness of Absa Bank that this would reduce further to some 15,000
over the next 20 years.
8
This paragraph summarizes the gloss of the table by Vink and Van Rooyen (2009, 323).
9
This number may include some black recipients of funds under the governments programme for Land Reform
and Agricultural Development (LRAD), introduced in 2001 (Ben Cousins, pers. comm.).
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Number of farms
Cumulative
(percentage)
Cumulative
(percentage)
>10 m
4 m9,999,999
2 m3,999,999
1 m1,999,999
300,000999,999
< R300,000
Total
673
1,675
3,041
5,214
11,805
23,428
45,818
1.5
5.1
11.7
23.1
48.9
100
17,850,383
10,330,424
5,056,986
7,351,291
5,335,646
7,404,322
53,329,052
33.5
52.8
62.3
76.1
86.1
100
28 Henry Bernstein
in the late 1990s, using imported technologies. In 2008, the proportions of the total maize area
planted with GM seed were 56 per cent for white maize and 72 per cent for yellow maize (plus
88 per cent for soya beans and 96 per cent for cotton; ACB 2009, 47).14
Sources of credit to commercial farmers have shifted from previous government funding,
both direct (through the Land Bank and Agricultural Credit Board) and indirect (through the
co-operatives), to private banks and other lenders (such as AFGRI, below), especially through
mortgage financing, and without any apparent adverse impact on farm investment (RSA 2010,
523). Profit rates in commercial farming dipped from 1990 to 2002, but have recovered in the
past decade, to exceed the sector interest rate in most years: farming has thus become more
profitable (RSA 2010, 10; but see further below).
Agribusiness
The functioning of domestic markets as well as international trade (below) has been affected by
the dismantling of the state marketing system, if not always in ways anticipated, or at least
advertised, by the advocates of a brave new world of deregulated (normalized) commercial
agriculture. That dismantling began before 1994, as noted, and was completed with the passage
of the Marketing of Agricultural Products Act of 1996 (RSA 1992b; Bayley 2000; RSA 2010,
348), accompanied or followed by various institutional and organizational changes. The
expectation was that such changes would create healthy competition in the spaces opened up
by abolition of de jure monopolies and the de facto monopolies that flourished in their protective
shadow.
Agribusiness understood here as corporate activity upstream of farming (supply of seeds,
fertilizer, agrichemicals, machinery) and downstream (milling and other processing, marketing
and distribution) was already highly concentrated in some branches and commodities by the
end of apartheid. It has become generally, if not comprehensively, more concentrated since
1994, with further processes of vertical integration, consolidation of market power, and private
regulation.15 This is illustrated by Chabane et al. (2008) with reference to food grains, milling
and baking, dairy products and poultry.16
At the same time, there have been some changes in key players (and their guises) in
agribusiness. One kind of change was noted earlier, namely the privatization of the giant
summer grain co-operatives, key pillars of organized agriculture during apartheid. This meant,
in effect, the privatization of their physical assets (notably grain silos, plus maize mills, feed mills,
feedlots and so on) and financial assets accumulated from four decades of state subsidy (Amin
14
White maize is grown for human consumption in the form of maize meal, yellow maize for processing into
animal feeds. For more detail on GM maize seed in South Africa, and sharply differing views of its impact, see,
inter alios, Gouse et al. (2005) and ACB (2010).
15
The two giant sugar corporations, Illovo and Tongaat-Hulett, practice high levels of vertical integration of
cane production with upstream and especially downstream activity. They dominate South Africas sugar sector
and are increasingly active in the Southern African region (see further below), with a recent strong interest in
biofuel production (and subsidies to support it).
16
Neo Chabane and her co-authors worked for the Competition Commission but wrote the paper cited in their
private capacities. Their evidence was derived from Commission investigations into collusive and other anticompetitive company behaviour, including proposed mergers referred to the Commission, which limits the scope
of their examples and analysis (see further below). Contrary to conventional notions of regulation, applied only
to the actions of states, Chabane et al. (2008) use the term private regulation, an indispensable concept for political
economy; see, for example, Friedmann (1993) on the reshaping of the world food economy since the 1970s, and
Bernstein (1996c) on South Africa. Chabane et al. (forthcoming) note that there is almost no reference to issues
of market power in the Presidency Review (RSA 2010).
Major companies
Vertical integration
Animal feeds
Poultry production
Poultry
63
Animal feeds
Maize and
wheat milling
90
and Bernstein 1996). The most prominent example is AFGRI, the name by which the former
East Transvaal Cooperative (OTK) is now listed on the JSE.17 AFGRI advertises itself as
South Africas leading agricultural services and foods business offering a wide range of
physical and intellectual inputs to farmers, producers and users of agricultural products. As
a transforming force in the business of agriculture, AFGRI offers farming clients banking,
broking, logistics, trading and retail services and we are producers of animal feeds, poultry,
proteins and oil.18
AFGRI appears in Table 2 as one of the big three in poultry feeds and one of the big four in
maize and wheat milling. It also has interests in seed and pesticide production (Table 3),
provides financial services to commercial farmers, and is a major player in maize trading on the
South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX). SAFEX was established in 1990 with a financial
markets division; its agricultural markets division was added in 1995 two dates that again
indicate how busy South African capital was in (re-)positioning itself in the years around the
political transition.
Mergers and acquisitions so characteristic of agribusiness concentration globally in recent
decades have become a feature of AFGRIs business strategy, as they are of longer established vertically integrated South African corporations that feature in Table 2. They are also
marked in agri-input branches since 1994, not least with the entry of international seed,
fertilizer and agrochemical corporations indicated in Table 3. It should be noted that reliable
information on market shares in the seed and pesticide industries is hard to come by, and
matters can be further complicated by licensing, interlocking share purchase deals and other
aspects of conglomeration.19
17
OTK, based in Bethal, was one of the two biggest summer grain co-operatives; the other was Senwes, the
Central West Transvaal Cooperative, based in Klerksdorp, which is the single largest trader of white maize, wheat
and sunflower seed (Chabane et al. forthcoming, 11). OTKs transition to private agribusiness corporation was
made possible by provisions of the 1993 Co-operatives Amendment Act, another (apartheid) government move
during the political transition that was little remarked in the fraught circumstances of the time.
18
See http://www.afgri.co.za (accessed 9 February 2012).
19
For example, Pannar has the largest number of varieties in the South African GM seed market, mostly licensed
from Monsanto; Plasskem, the leading South African pesticide producer, is a subsidiary of Chemical Services Ltd
(Chemserve) in turn controlled by AECI, a publicly listed South African company with its historic roots in the
mining industry, and currently planning to expand its international operations.What follows is largely derived from
the valuable report by the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB 2009) on biotechnology and agricultural input
value chains in South Africa.
30 Henry Bernstein
Table 3. Leading companies in seeds, fertilizers and pesticides operating in South Africa
Company
Pannar
Monsanto
Syngenta
DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred
AFGRI
Hygrotech
Sakata Seed
Sasol
Omnia
Yara
Foskor
Plaaskem
Bayer
Dow Agroscience
Volcano Agrosciencesa
MakhteshimAgan
Universal Crop Production
BASF
Villa Crop Protection
Seed
GM seed
#
#
#
+
+
#
#
#
#
+
#
+
Fertilizers
Pesticides
#
+
#
+
+
+
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
The biggest seed production company is Pannar, a South African corporation that operates
globally. Monsanto is second primarily through acquisitions, having purchased two of South
Africas largest seed companies, Sensako and Carnia, in 1999 and 2000. By 2002, Monsanto,
Pannar and Pioneer between them shared 90 per cent of the market for grain seeds (maize,
wheat and sorghum). In 2009, by its own account, Monsanto had a 50 per cent share in the
maize seed market.
The fertilizer industry, historically connected with mining supplies companies, had grown
under state protection until the 1980s. Following deregulation, South Africa became a net
importer of fertilizer for the first time in around 2000. Norsk Hydro, one of the worlds leading
fertilizer corporations, purchased Kynoch (now Yara SA), and closed down its urea plants, so
that all urea is now imported, as is all potash and 4060 per cent of nitrogen for fertilizer
production. Imports as a proportion of domestic fertilizer needs rose from less than 20 per cent
in 1990 to over 65 per cent in 2008 (Grain SA 2011, iv). Today, Sasol Agri (the sole producer
of ammonia), Omnia and Yara are the dominant suppliers of fertilizers and of intermediate
materials for further blending/processing by other companies.20
The top ten pesticide companies in the world are all represented in South Africa, including
the Big Six in global agrichemicals: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred,
20
In 2008, the three companies had a combined 86 per cent share of the market in fertilizers (Grain SA
2011, iv).
21
32 Henry Bernstein
New Mobilities of Capital
The entry of FDI (foreign direct investment) in South African agriculture since 1994 has been
limited but strategic, as noted above with reference to seed, agrichemical and fertilizer industries. Other significant entrants include the giant agricultural commodities trading firm Cargill
and the notorious dairy company Parmalat (note 13 above), and Walmart is now poised to make
its mark on food retail marketing (see below). An important purpose of such investment by
multinational corporations is to establish a base in South Africa for subsequent expansion in the
continent.
Here, I focus on the export of South African capitals of different kinds since 1994, exploiting
the new opportunities for mobility opened up to them by the end of apartheid. First, there has
been movement by South African commercial farmers since 1994 (and before), as individuals
or in small groups, to establish farms elsewhere in the region (e.g. Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique) and further afield (e.g. Kenya, Nigeria). Some of this was, no doubt, to escape ANC
government (Hall 2011b). Second, and quite different, is the more recent role of Agri SA in
actively pursuing land concessions, and other favourable conditions, for new farming enterprises
in a number of African countries. A notable example is a deal negotiated by Agri SA with the
government of Congo (Brazzaville) to allocate a consortium of South African commercial
farmers an initial area of 200,000 hectares of former state farms, with the option of expanding
to 10 million hectares (Hall 2011b; see also Martiniello 2010).
There may be another push factor in this second and much more significant movement,
which is articulated by Agri SA, namely a squeeze on the profitability of capitalist farming in
South Africa registered in ongoing cost-price inflation of farm inputs, and the effects of some
tax and regulatory measures. The other side of the same coin is that South African commercial
farmers are going elsewhere on the continent . . . to find cheap land, water, labour and more
lenient tax conditions from which to export to whichever markets seem most lucrative (Hall
2011b, 1516), perhaps spurred on by the example, and apparent ease, of contemporary land
grabbing by foreign investors in Africa more generally.
As Hall aptly observes, this is not so much the export of a farming model as that of
contemporary agribusiness and its modes of organizing commodity chains.22 It is not surprising
then also to find that the sugar corporations Illovo and Tongaat-Hulett have rapidly reinvented
themselves as regional businesses, and now operate in six countries each in southern and east
Africa (Hall 2011b, 8), with a particular interest in biofuel feedstocks and production.23 Indeed,
Hall points out that of 16 major land acquisitions by South African companies elsewhere in
Africa, 12 are for agrofuels jatropha for biodiesel, sugarcane for bioethanol, or a combination
of other feedstocks such as maize, soya and palm oil while three are largely for food crop
production and one for carbon sequestration.24 She also notes the interests of South African
companies in engineering and construction, notably PGBI consulting engineers the leading
22
Indeed, South African commercial farmers involved in the Congo and similar deals do not intend to settle on
the land they acquire. Hall (2011b, 15) asks: What exactly then might South African farmers be bringing to the
rest of Africa, if (as in some cases so far) they get the land for free, do not bring capital, and do not manage the
farms? It would be useful to know about the types and extent of involvement in such deals of black commercial
farmers (for an example, see Farmers Weekly, 11 May 2012) and of key (Agri)BEE actors (see below; and for an
example, Hall 2011b, 7). More generally on land grabbing in the Southern African region, the nuanced analysis
by Hall (2011a) rightly emphasizes the role of African governments, some of which have approached Agri SA; and
on the importance of access to water in land grabbing in Africa, see Woodhouse (2012).
23
See also Richardson (2010) on Illovo in Zambia.
24
Perhaps significantly for the interest of South African capital in biofuel production elsewhere in Africa, the
Biofuels Industrial Strategy announced by the South African government in December 2007 excludes the use of
South African maize as a feedstock because of concerns about food supply and prices.
34 Henry Bernstein
In the six volumes of a notable work of oppositional social science, the Surplus Peoples
Project (SPP) documented the removals of black South Africa between 1960 and 1983, and
concluded that some 3.5 million were forcibly relocated to the bantustans in that period, 1.1
million of them from their homes on white farms (Platzky and Walker 1985). A subsequent, less
exhaustive, study covering the next 20-year period (19842004), estimated removals of some
4.2 million black Africans, of whom some 1.7 million a deliberately conservative estimate
were evicted from farms (Wegerif et al. 2005). The data for 19842004 suggest a fairly
consistent pattern of year-on-year evictions before and after the end of apartheid, albeit with
more evictions between 1994 and 2004 and with peaks in 1984, after severe drought; in 1992,
again in the wake of massive drought and as white farmers anticipated the advent of an ANC
government; in 1997, when the government passed the Extension of Security of Tenure Act
(ESTA); and in 2003, when a minimum wage for farm workers was introduced (and raised in
subsequent years).
In the 10 years from 1995 to 2004, over 2 million black people left white farms where they
lived, of whom about 930,000 were evicted.The principal reason for evictions was loss of farm
employment (almost 70 per cent of cases). Few evictions follow due process now provided by
law, and ESTA both as statute and in practice provides inadequate safeguards for often
long-established farm workers and other residents.30
While official employment data have to be treated with considerable caution,31 they suggest
that total farm employment went down from about 1.2 million in 1990 to 940,000 in 2002,
when it also registered a notable shift towards casual employment at 49 per cent of the total,
in which anticipation of the introduction of the minimum wage in agriculture (from 2003) was
perhaps a factor (Wegerif et al. 2005, 33).32 Employment declined by 15 per cent from 1994 to
2002, and the decline accelerated from 2002 to 2006. In all, 40 per cent of farm workers lost
their jobs between 1993 and 2006, when there were less than 628,200 enumerated agricultural
workers (RSA 2010, 20): Although hard data do not exist, anecdotal evidence from all
provinces suggests that evictions from farms substantially contributed to the growth of dense
rural informal settlements, as well as to the growth of peri-urban informal settlements in both
urban centres and in the platteland (ibid., 21)33
Farm wages seem to have increased steadily, if also patchily, in recent years, albeit with some,
again familiar, qualifications.34 For example, growing money wages often replace previous
payments in kind; lower-paid workers tend to be more vulnerable to sacking and eviction
30
Of 24,400 claims for security of tenure lodged by March 2001, only 175 had been settled by July 2005
(Wegerif et al. 2005, 47). See further Hall et al. in this special issue.
31
One problem, not unique to South Africa but very marked there, is the numbers of undocumented farm
workers, especially those who are illegal immigrants for example, Zimbabweans working on farms in the border
zones of the north (Rutherford and Addison 2007) to the Western Cape (Theron 2010); the women who
commute daily from Leostho to horticultural enterprises in the eastern Free State (Johnston 2007); and many
migrant agricultural workers from Mozambique. Another problem, albeit perhaps less significant than in the past,
is unrecorded labour by members of farm worker households.
32
According to Bhorat et al. (2012), farm worker wages rose by 17 per cent between 2003 and 2007, and
contributed to declining employment in agriculture, even though about 60 per cent of farm workers received less
than the minimum wage in 2007; see also note 42 below.
33
Platteland refers to the countryside, a term whose meaning has expanded to encompass all areas outside the big
urban centres. See also Wegerif et al. (2005, chs 6 and 7), whose data suggest that most evictees are no worse off,
materially and socially, than when they lived and worked on farms. On one hand, opportunities to keep livestock
and cultivate crops are generally significantly reduced. On the other hand, social grants are now more important
to the incomes of many evicted households, which also enjoy improved access to certain infrastructure and services
than they had on farms.
34
National statistics on farm wages are very weak.They are gathered too seldom, are not disaggregated enough,
and rely on voluntary returns for their information (Greenberg 2010a, 16).
36 Henry Bernstein
in international prices than to downward movements typically more rapidly and more slowly,
respectively. In a careful analysis of the inflation of 2002, Chabane (2004) was one of the first
to point to the effects of concentration and market power for consumer prices, and Traub and
Meyer (2008, 224) found that
real maize milling/retailing margins in South Africa have increased by at least 20% since
the deregulation of retail prices in 1991. Moreover, there is evidence of trend growth in
the size of the milling margin over time. Simulations indicate that the deregulation of
maize meal prices has entailed a transfer of at least US$179 million/year from consumers
to agents in the marketing system.37
TRANSFORMATION(S)?
Transformation was the clarion call of the transition of 19904, on the lips of all those who
hoped, or claimed to hope, that historic change was on the agenda to overcome the inheritance
of South Africas racialized capitalism and its massive inequalities.38 Today, the term transformation is heard less. In this section, I assess selected changes in agriculture since 1994 along a
spectrum of transformation(s), referring to changes of more and less profound impact on the
social relations of production and reproduction. My criterion, in line with the purposes of this
special issue, is the effects for the social reproduction of South Africas classes of labour rather
than standard notions of the performance of the agricultural sector (growth and dynamism,
efficiency and competitiveness etc.); that is, from the viewpoint of capital, which informs the
discourses of most government reports, producer organizations, the farming and business press,
and conventional economic analysis. By classes of labour I mean the growing numbers . . .
who now depend directly and indirectly on the sale of their labour power for their own daily
reproduction (Panitch and Leys, 2001, ix, emphasis added). Indirectly is important here, as it
suggests a more expansive notion than inherited concepts of proletarianization and the like, to
encompass the various components of the so-called informal working class and the reserve
army of labour (Bernstein 2009), including the vast numbers of small/marginal/poor farmers
in the South (Bernstein 2010; Lerche 2010).39
Farm Labour
Given the histories of farm labour regimes during (and before) apartheid, and the difficulties of
organizing farm workers, especially in the conditions that prevailed in South Africa, legislation
since 1994 concerning security of tenure for black residents on white farms (ESTA), and
minimum wage levels appears as a significant transformation, or potentially so. As noted
above, however, this has to be qualified by the steady, or dramatic, decline in numbers of
permanent farm workers, albeit that some the most skilled have improved conditions of
37
I had suggested (Bernstein 1996b, 141) that the ostensibly historic deregulation of the maize industry would
be completed when potent corporate interests had secured the conditions of their (private) regulation of the
market. The studies cited seem to support that prediction.
38
The most informative and incisive single-volume account of socio-economic and political change since 1994
is by Marais (2011), although he says almost nothing about agriculture.
39
It is also more easily, and usefully, disassociated from potent images (memories?) of the proletariat as the
classic industrial working class; on the formation and dynamics of classes of labour in other guises than the latter,
see the illuminating studies and arguments of van der Linden (2008) and Banaji (2010). On discourses of wage
employment in South African policies, politics and ideologies, before and since the end of apartheid, see
the provocative study by Barchiesi (2011).
38 Henry Bernstein
Table 4. Selected Competition Commission investigations of agribusiness
Activity/commodity Companies investigated
Reason
Date of decision
Decision
Fertilizers
Cartel conduct in
the supply of
nitrogenous fertiliser
May 2009
Bakeries (bread)
Tiger, Premier,
Foodcorp,
Pioneer
Cartel conduct,
price fixing
November
2007
February
2010
Pioneer fined
R175 million
Grain milling,
bread, poultry
and eggs
Pioneer
Several cases of
anti-competitive
behaviour
November
2010
Pioneer to pay
additional R500
milliona
Milk
Clover, Nestl,
Parmalat and others
April 2011
Case withdrawnb
Grain storage
June 2011
Settlement reachedc
Seeds
Pioneer Hi-Bred
(Dow Chemicals)
and Pannar
Anti-competitive
effects of
proposed merger
December
2010
Merger refused
Retail
distribution
Walmart and
Massmart
Anti-competitive
effects of purchase of
majority stake in
Massmart by Walmart
March 2012
Walmart takeover
approved
46
Much of it detailed in Greenberg (2010a), whose systematic status report usefully locates land reform in a wider
political economy of South African agriculture, including its environmental dimensions not dealt with in this paper.
47 The Presidency Review notes that After almost 14 years of state sponsored land reform, slightly more than 4
million ha of the available agricultural land in South Africa has been transferred through the formal programme.
Furthermore government recently admitted that the failure rate of new land reform projects could be as high as
50% (RSA 2010, 41). It further suggests that private transfers, some funded by mortgages from the Land Bank or
the commercial banks, have occurred at a higher rate than have state transfers (ibid., 42), and that Production
conditions in the communal farming areas have remained largely unchanged or may even have worsened, and
tenure forms have hardly changed in the communal areas, despite attempts to provide greater tenure security (ibid.).
How necessary the latter is to production growth in the former homelands is explored and questioned in the case
studies in Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 2). See further the overview of black farming by Cousins in this special issue.
40 Henry Bernstein
Table 5. A typology of black farmers
Production unit
Turnover
Number
Commercial in
communal areas
>R300,000
Communal ownership
Development projects
Private ownership
Emerging commercial
in communal areas
<R300,000
>20 hectares
Communal ownership
Small farmers in development projects
Private ownership
35,000
<20 hectares
Communal ownership
Private ownership
Little formal market participation
1.246 million
Subsistence in
communal areas
Allotments
Market gardens
strategic elements, is driven much more by other factors and purposes than by fears of any
prospective radical land reform in South Africa and is supported by the government (above).
Also, some commercial farmers and farmers and agribusiness organizations initiated their own
(localized) transformation projects, typically as a gesture towards rainbow nationhood the
new inclusiveness but not in ways that threaten existing (and expanding) configurations of
power in relations of property, production and markets.
As indicated earlier, there are no systematic or adequate data on the numbers and types of
black farmers who they are, what they do and where they are to assess transformation(s)
since 1994. The Presidency Review notes that data on the small-scale farming sector are not
readily available. The last survey that directly focused on this group of farmers was a one-off
survey conducted by the Department of Agriculture and StatsSA in 1999 (RSA 2010, 21),
apparently also used by Vink and Van Rooyen (2009). Table 5, derived from their paper,
illustrates the problem.
First, the figure for subsistence farmers is most likely a significant underestimation. In the
most comprehensive study to date of smallholder (black) farming in South Africa, Aliber et al.
(2009, vol. 1, 4) use annual Labour Force Survey (LFS) data for 2007, to give a figure of 4
million farmers in 2 million households in communal areas, of whom 92 per cent farm for
subsistence; that is, for a main or extra source of food.48
Second,Vink and Van Rooyen give no data for numbers (nor farm sizes) of black commercial
farmers in communal areas and the figure of 35,000 emerging commercial farmers is purely
imaginary (Ben Cousins, pers. comm.).Again, by contrast,Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 1) suggest about
320,000 commercially oriented small holders who farm for a main or extra source of
[monetary] income.49 Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish in any useful socio-economic sense
between the first and second categories in Table 5 fromVink andVan Rooyens text (2009, 334).
Third,Vink and Van Rooyens typology considers only black farmers on land in communal
areas, and hence omits those, albeit few, who have acquired land in formerly white areas
48
They also use the LFS data to provide a broad profile of black smallholders by gender, age and geographical
distribution.
49
Greenberg (2010a, xi) gives an estimated 240,000 black farmers with a commercial focus.
50
The case of Pitso Sekhoto, owner of Makolobane Farmers Enterprise in the Senekal area in the Free State?
His farm supplies milk to Woolworths retail stores nationally and apples to fresh produce markets in Pretoria,
Bloemfontein, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg. It employs 34 farm workers and 66 additional seasonal workers
for the apple harvest from January to March. During a visit to Senekal (in early 2011?) the Agriculture Minister
Tina Joemat-Pettersson emphasized that the establishment of successful black commercial farmers is
key to land reform in South Africa. See http://www.southafrica.info/news/business/442005.htm (accessed 18
November 2011).
51
For example, Gift Mafuleka who has a 5-year lease on a portion of Leeuwfontein farm, where he was
previously a crop manager, near Bronkhorstspruit on the border of Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces. His
enterprise is supported by the food multinational corporation McCain, to which Mafuleka delivers peas and sweet
corn to pay for irrigation equipment supplied by McCain. See http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/
newbusiness/mphiwesiyalima-201010.htm#ixzz1sZ5grL22 (accessed 18 November 2011).
52
See http://www.sagoodnews.co.za/agriculture_land_reform/agri_sa_backs_black_farmers.html (accessed 9
February 2011).
53
Overviews of its provisions are given in RSA (2010, 567) and Greenberg (2010a, 3740).
54
See
http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/empowerment/agribee-290411.htm#ixzz1sZ56Vuy4
(accessed 18 November 2011).
42 Henry Bernstein
Notable examples of BEE business transactions, some predating AgriBEE, include
(Greenberg 2010a, 378):
purchase of Boschendal wine estate, for R323 million;
acquisition of a 25.1 per cent stake in KWV by Phetego Investments;55
acquisition of a 15 per cent stake in Distells South African Distilleries and Wines by a BEE
consortium;
acquisition of a 26.77 per cent stake in AFGRI Operations by the Agri Sizwe Empowerment Trust, for R502 million;
acquisition of a 4 per cent stake in Country Foods by the Kagiso Trust, for R5.5 million; and
acquisition of a 30 per cent stake in exporter Afrifresh Group by Vuwa Investments.
The first three deals were in the Western Cape wine industry, and among an earlier wave of
acquisitions by BEE investment companies that sprang up after 1994, typically closely linked
with senior ANC politicians, their relatives and other associates (see, inter alios, Freund 2007;
Southall 2007; Marais 2011).They were also a result of politically extremely complicated, murky
and compromised processes of restructuring/reform of the wine industry (Williams 2005; du
Toit et al. 2008).56 The other cases listed also follow the BEE pattern established earlier of share
acquisitions, in this context in existing agricultural and food companies.Whether AgriBEE will
succeed in transforming the prospects of significant numbers of the dispossessed, classes of
labour in the countryside remains to be seen. but the experiences of land reform to date do not
support any realistic expectations of progress.
CONCLUSION
The survey in this paper shows a process of normalization of capitalist agriculture (farming and
agribusiness) in South Africa since 1994, albeit in abnormal historical circumstances. The end
of apartheid, one can observe, was both historic and much compromised. It strikes me even
more forcefully now than it did during the years of the transition, when I spent considerable
time in the country, how effectively South African agrarian and agribusiness capital with the
support of the last apartheid government (re-)positioned itself for the new dispensation, and
on many fronts: economic and legal, political and ideological. This is not to say that there was
a single encompassing master plan (or conspiracy) of organized agriculture, but there was a
series of connecting plots by groups with more knowledge of how agriculture works and
greater coherent purpose than the ANC was able to mobilize, and which laid the ground for
subsequent normalization qua deregulation/liberalization.57
55
KWV is Kooperatiewe WijnmakersVereniging, the historically dominant organization in the wine industry.
For a detailed analysis of the KWVPhetego deal, see Williams (2005), and further on this, as well as Boschendal
the first corporate BEE deal in the wine industry in 2003 and the Distell case, du Toit et al. (2008,
1821).
56
Du Toit et al. (2008, 28) conclude that The South African wine industry, by casting Black Economic
Empowerment as a managerial exercise through the Wine BEE Charter and its codes, and by reducing
transformation to a marketing exercise . . . has been able to avoid facing potentially more uncomfortable
outcomes of transformation such as land redistribution, import boycotts and much improved working conditions
for grape pickers that would go much further to redress persistent racialized inequalities.
57
Plots in the sense deployed in Leys and Players compelling study (2011) of the politics of privatization of the
National Health Service in England; that is, dense networks and practices of covert collusion between corporate
interests and government. That strategic stances and key decisions concerning organized agriculture during the
transition in South Africa laid the basis for much of what happened after 1994 is also due to weaknesses of the
ANC, indicated in the next paragraph.
44 Henry Bernstein
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