THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES INVITATION - HYBRID EVENT
With land reform and talks of an agrarian revolution continuing to dominate the political discourse of most of the left leaning political organisations in South Africa, this ISER seminar presents a discussion led by Prof. C.N. Mbatha on one of the many fundamental challenges that face the land reform project in the country. The discussion is based on an ongoing study looking at the few market access opportunities for small farmers in communal lands. The case for the research is of villagers who keep and sell livestock at different markets in the Upper uMzimvubu River Catchment in the eastern part of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
Research study summary:
Land use and management reform as well as agrarian development policies in post-1994 South Africa are probably the most politically and economically contested terrains in our contemporary society. Partially, this is because the policies have encountered primarily two sets of structural challenges. The first set has been the slow pace at which legal claim and transfer processes of land units to previously disenfranchised communities and persons from state-owned and expropriated land properties have proceeded. Essentially this set of challenges confronts the modification of private to collective access and ownership rights. The second set features issues that have arisen in the post-transfer periods. Some of these relate to decision-making conflicts over land management practices, especially among new owners with collective rights. In many instances these are linked to decisions and historical constraints on deriving livelihoods from newly acquired land resources, especially through potential business ideas and ventures. This discussion focusses on the second set of challenges, which are widely written about, to include a) the lack of access to financial resources to invest in building new or maintaining existing infrastructure on acquired properties, and b) the lack of useful administrative and business information as well as social networks to participate meaningfully in mainstream commercial agricultural value chains. In most economic literature, the latter set of challenges is referred to as lack of market access. Our study is concerned with these market issues as they relate typically to common-land small farmers in South Africa.
Our research uses the case of villagers in the Upper uMzimvubu river catchment of the Eastern Cape province to explore how innovative interventions to deal with market access issues, among others, have fared in the last ten years. The issues looked at in this study are primarily for livestock. We evaluate the performance in the resolution of issues by using a complex systems approach, which to some degree overlaps with a number of theoretical propositions from institutional economists. We do this by looking at social relationships which constitute the socio-economic system of our study area. To support our qualitative understanding of the emergent system and its identifiable features we also present results from a quantitative analysis of two datasets. These are the data collected from mobile village cattle auctions from 2014 to 2023 and the data from seller-surveys conducted in three villages of the uMzimvubu River Catchment in 2023. We find that although the innovations seem to have improved the overall resilience and performances of the system to yield higher environmental and livelihoods states, there are still some fault lines that have posed urgent risks to the system. This has been the case for some time. The important relationships that make up the system may also have begun to break down along these fault lines, thereby reversing the achievements of the last ten years if not attended to. These findings have implications for policy attempts at replicating similar interventions elsewhere in the country.
Where and who: The discussion will be in a hybrid-mode, led by Prof. Nhlanhla Mbatha (Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University) and responded to by Dr Binganidzo Muchara, (Senior Lecturer in the School of Business Leadership, Unisa). The event is chaired by Dr Samual Sadian, (Rhodes University, ISER research fellow).
When: 1 August 2024 from 14h00 to 15h45 SAT
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For in-person attendance: ISER Annex Building, No. 7 Prince Alfred Street Rhodes University Campus
Email: mzukisi.kuse@ru.ac.za for any requirements
Speaker: Prof. Cyril Nhlanhla Mbatha
Prof. C.N. Mbatha is the Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University. He actively conducts research on natural resources management, including research on South Africa’s land and water laws, environmental and agricultural trade issues in sub-Saharan Africa. He is co-leading a Science Cluster on Land and Investments in Africa (SCOLIA) for the Future Earth Africa Hub (FEAH). He worked at Unisa, where he was the founding Director of the Young African Leaders Initiative for Southern Africa, and acting Dean in the School of Business Leadership, Unisa, before joining the ISER in 2020.
Discussant: Dr Binganidzo Muchara
Dr B. Muchara is a senior lecturer in the School of Business Leadership, Unisa. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from UKZN. His research interests are in Water Resource Economics, Agribusiness and value chain analysis as well as water governance. He has led the WRC project on Water use in food value chains of indigenous crops with special focus on production and post-harvest handling of food products (WRC PROJECT NO. K5/2715/4). Prior to joining the business school, he worked in various capacities in the private sector (2002-2008), research and consulting services, in the field of economics, water resource management, value chain analysis and socio-economic surveys. Dr Muchara joined academia in 2007, and has been a researcher for several projects funded by the Water Research Commission (WRC), Oxfam, FAO, DAFF, USAID, etc.
Chair: Dr Samuel Dominic Sadian
Dr S.D. Sadian is a research fellow at the Rhodes University’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). Dr Sadian’s Doctoral thesis focussed on overcoming the conceptual and empirical shortcomings of neo-Marxist and other productivistic approaches to modern social change in the humanities and social sciences. It portrayed consumer practices as an essential dimension of struggles for recognition in circuits of market exchange, centralised redistribution and social reciprocity and develops an approach to consumption potentially applicable to a wide range of modern social settings, using case studies from post-Second World War South Africa in the fields of housing, healing and clothing.