A Slipping Hold? Farm Dweller Precarity in South Africa’s Changing Agrarian Economy and Climate

Abstract

Abstract:The paper investigates whether farm dwellers in the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province of South Africa are subject to a "double exposure": vulnerable both to the impacts of post-apartheid agrarian dynamics and to the risks of climate change. The evidence is drawn from a 2017 survey that was undertaken by the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), which is a land rights Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), of 843 farm dweller households. Data on the current living conditions and livelihoods was collected on 15.3% of the farm dweller population in the area. The paper demonstrates that farm dwellers are a fragmented, agricultural precariat subject to push and pull drivers of mobility that leave them with a precarious hold on rural farm dwellings. The key provocation is that we need to be attentive to whether the hold farm dwellers have over land and livelihoods is slipping further as a result of instability in the agrarian economy? This instability arises from agriculture's arguably maladaptive response to the intersection of structural agrarian change and climate risk in post-apartheid South Africa. While the outcomes will only be apparent in time, the risks are real, and the paper concludes with a call for agrarian policy pathways that are both more adaptive and achieve social justice objectives.

Decision-making for nature’s contributions to people in the Cape Floristic Region: the role of values, rules and knowledge

“…Effective land planning is required to integrate not only agricultural land use with biodiversity conservation, but also social justice (Crane 2006;Hornby et al 2018). Our study focused on land-use decision-makers and therefore does not represent every member of the Swartland society, including farm labourers, who are among those affected most by structural inequality.…”

At what geographic scales does agricultural alienation amplify foodborne disease outbreaks? A statistical test for 25 U.S. states, 1970-2000

“…With so much of their revenue structurally dedicated to overcapitalizing on inputs and, at the other end of production, settling for end buyers’ monopolistic pricing, even the more successful U.S. farmers, many of whom survived by consolidating their neighbors’ farms into economies of scale, are still relying on loans, federal crop insurance, fixed direct payments, and off-farm income (Burns and Prager 2016, Bekkerman et al 2019). Much as any semi-proletarianized farmer or rural precariat of the global South, or itinerant migrant labor they hire stateside, U.S. farmers, albeit inside a different risk matrix, are cycle-migrating from farm to urban employment or even in the same spot working remotely (Arrighi 2009, Bryceson 2010, Baird 2011, Hornby et al 2018). This precarity undercuts the stable sociality needed to organize resistance, or an out-and-out alternative, to the agribusiness food regime (Arrighi 2009, Davis 2018).…”

“Reproducing the social”: contradictory interconnections between land, cattle production and household relations in the Besters Land Reform Project, South Africa

“…Rather, the social dynamics of change that characterise the Besters Land Reform Project are the outcome of contradictory processes of social reproduction and accumulation at the different sites of production and reproduction (household and CPA) that have contributed to, if not caused, social differences to emerge along multiple lines. A labour class, fragmented by gender, generation and space, is composed of younger men and women migrating into towns and cities in search of work (Hornby et al 2018), women remaining in the rural home and securing income from survivalist enterprises and social grants, and older men accumulating cattle stock through combinations of wage work, CPA cattle transfers and input subsidies. The livelihoods are diverse and combined in complex ways within and across households with footprints from farms to cities across the country.…”