Determinants of the demand for regular farm labour in South Africa, 1960–2002

Abstract

This paper estimates long-run price (wage)

Game farm conversions and the land question: unpacking present contradictions and historical continuities in farm dwellers' tenure insecurity in Cradock

“…This amounts to a 27% decline in the first period, and 46.9% in the second. Internationally, the agricultural sector has moved towards greater labour flexibility since the 1980s, with an increasing proportion of the labour force becoming casualised (Ewert and Hamman 1999;Sparrow et al 2008). Domestically, the casualised cohort of farm labour rose from 36% in 1991 to 49% by 200249% by (Sparrow et al 2008.…”

“…Hunting for the pot and for sport has historically been part of white social fabric in the Karoo (Southey 1990). The use of wildlife within the settler colonial milieu can be divided into four main periods: (1) the era of laissez-faire hunting and trading that resulted in the decimation of wild animals from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth century; (2) the rise of an elite defined hunting and conservationist ethos in the 1880s; (3) the domination of scientific agriculture in the first half of the twentieth century which intensified the destruction of game classified as 'vermin'; and (4) the revival of conservationism amongst white landed classes from the 1970s into the contemporary era (Brown 2002;Carruthers 2008).…”

“…For the greater part of the twentieth century in the vicinity of the town of Cradock, it was state-driven conservation through the Mountain Zebra National Park (proclaimed in 1937) that dominated land-use change for wildlife purposes (Southey 1990). 4 Long-term economic decline poses serious challenges for towns like Cradock, whose viability and status as rural service centres, 'originally had developed to meet the needs of agriculturebased communities' (Nel and Hill 2008, 2).…”

Management decisions on commercial sugarcane farms in KwaZulu-Natal: a focus on choice bracketing behaviour for risk management

“…Mean factor loadings suggest that as average skill levels increase among the permanent labour force, so does the extent to which casual labour is employed. This may be explained by respondents having consolidated their permanent labour forces due to restrictive government labour policies, retaining those with relatively higher skills, and substituting the less skilled with casual labour (Simbi & Aliber, 2000;Sparrow et al, 2006;Vink, 2004;Valodia et al, 2006). Mean factor scores for the two study regions are statistically significantly different at the one percent level of probability.…”

Farmers’ perceptions of the impact of legislation on farm workers’ wages and working conditions: an eastern cape case study

“…In South Africa, however, agriculture has shed labour, especially over the past 50 years: the number of labourers (regular and casual) employed in 2007 was only 60 per cent of the number employed in 1960 (StatsSA, 2005, in Sparrow et al, 2008and StatsSA, 2009).…”