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The Impact of Land Reform on Commercial Farm Workers' Livelihoods
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6. CONCLUSIONS
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The key point arising from this assessment is how inextricably linked the livelihoods of commercial farm workers are to the fate of the farm. Yet the results of the research on the 5 farms visited indicate that the way commercial farm workers are affected by the current land reform process and land occupations vary quite significantly.
Based on the findings on the baseline farm, and on those for workers on other farms who have not been significantly affected by the land issue, it can be said that in "normal" circumstances workers are reasonably food secure. They can meet their minimum food needs quite comfortably and have some capacity to cope with reduced income. However that is not to say that their situation is satisfactory. They are still poor in absolute terms, and their access to services such as health and education in particular is far from satisfactory.
The worst case scenario for a commercial farm worker involves loss of employment and displacement. If this occurs, the effects on their livelihoods are multiple and extreme:
- Loss of home
- Loss of permanent income and secondary casual/ seasonal income from agricultural work
- Loss of access to land and inputs for own crop production (affects consumption and income from sale of crops)
- Loss of access to fishing grounds
- Loss of access to gold-panning opportunities (on some farms)
- Loss of access to subsidised foodstuffs at the farm store, and loss of credit facilities
- Loss of access to education and health services (alternatives to on-farm services may either not be available at all, or may be too far and/ or too expensive to access)
Although this study examined only farms where the farmer had stayed in spite of designation and/ or occupation, there must be cases where the farmer decided to cease operations because of designation, occupation or simply because of the prevailing economic and political climate. At worst, the workers on those farms will face the above problems, and at best they will be in the situation of the "unemployed" group in the last case study.
In between the baseline and worst-case extremes are the types of situations described in the case studies. The example of the "occupied, not designated" farm shows that there is a possibility for co-existence between new settlers and existing farming activities. Current government policy is to target farms, or parts of farms, which have been left idle, and the findings here would certainly suggest that this is a positive approach. In other cases where productive land is designated, there are often problems for the farm workers. As opportunities for production decrease on a farm, the farmer is likely to cut costs initially by reducing benefits (such as access to credit), then by laying off some staff, and then by reducing the number of working days for remaining workers until operations cease entirely. Concurrently, provision of on-farm services may be cut back, though the timing of such a decision appears to depend on the individual farmer.
The ability of a farm worker to replace lost income appears to depend mainly on whether (a) there are operational neighbouring farms where additional seasonal/ casual work could be sought, and (b) whether there are (still) opportunities for gold-panning or fishing on the farm. In all the cases examined, no examples were found of farm workers being able to compensate in any substantial way for lost earnings from agricultural work. Furthermore, there will inevitably be a limit to how much additional labour other commercial farms can absorb, and a limit to the capacity of services on those farms to cope with additional people. Gold-panning and fishing are both also limited, and can have negative environmental effects in terms of increased river siltation on the one hand, and over-fishing on the other.
Alternative income sources are clearly limited; land and inputs for cultivation are limited; and the availability of "free" resources such as fish and wild foods are also limited. The burden of coping with lost income, therefore, falls on expenditure. However, because "normal" income levels are already low, it does not take long before any further cutbacks impact on basic needs. In the three cases where a group of workers had lost income, they all were estimated to be consuming less than their minimum food needs, and children were also having to forego education.
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