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Many countries in the region face chronic land problems which have clear roots in the dispossession of Africans under colonialism and apartheid, and the powerful legacy this has left both in terms of outright suffering and also in the historical memory. This of course is one reason why the rhetoric of Robert Mugabe resonates so powerfully with the poor. In other countries, problems are more closely related to post-independence policies and an unbalanced approach to land allocation, which has favoured certain groups over others. In all cases, there is a general failure by governments to integrate land policy into either a rural development strategy or a wider social and economic development vision.
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Governments have also failed to allocate the financial and human resources needed to address land problems. At the same time, donors have found it increasingly difficult to justify the allocation of aid resources to land reform in the region. This reluctance is due to the lack of viable policies and programmes and is also a response to policy trends – in practice if not in rhetorical terms - away from the pro-poor agenda that donors feel should be the focus of land reform policies. Land grabbing by elite groups is evident across the region, even where new legal frameworks protect existing local land rights. The appalling food security impact of events in Zimbabwe may also have frightened off even those who favour a radical approach to land reform.
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All the Southern African countries face a huge crisis in land access and use as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Their agricultural sectors are in a moribund state due to unfavourable international terms of trade and the structural constraints facing especially small-scale farmers in the wider context of the global economy. While producers in most countries of the region are vulnerable to rainfall failure, the serious impact of the current drought underlines how a ‘drought of good governance’ can make a bad situation much worse.
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There are also signs across the region that problems are due to a failure of governments that are varyingly authoritarian, centralised, and indifferent to human rights issues. Racial and ethnic polarisation has been an unhappy consequence of the crisis in Zimbabwe.
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Civil society pressure for and in support of sustainable land reform in the region is weak, while weak economies and continuing political uncertainties in several countries undermine capacity and confidence in the ability of African people themselves to address and solve these problems.
Is there a land crisis?
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Our meeting was a response to a felt need to respond to the perceived ‘land crisis’ in the region. We were concerned over the lack of real progress with redistributive land reform in South Africa and Namibia and faltering or uneven processes in other countries.
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We recognised that not all is gloom and despondency. Some progress is being achieved with tenure reform in several countries, which is encouraging. Botswana, although perhaps tarnished by its policy of communal rangeland enclosure, continues to improve the administration of both customary and state land. Land reform efforts continue in Malawi and Lesotho. Mozambique has a progressive and single law for the whole country and is committed to seeing it implemented. Zambia may be in the process of getting to grips with tenure reform and needs to focus on sorting out the state (leasehold) land sector and the associated backlogs and corruption. Swaziland recognises the importance of land reform in the wider context of urgently needed constitutional and governance changes - but does not yet see it as a priority.
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Angola, emerging from the chaos of several decades of civil war, is at a critical stage, in which government and civil society need to be encouraged to learn lessons from other countries in the region. Perhaps one key lesson is the wisdom of first developing a clear land policy that has widespread support, and only then proceeding to revise or rewrite the laws to implement it. Land policies and laws that do not have this kind of support will inevitably lead to more conflicts than they resolve.
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There is no doubt though that Zimbabwe is in the grip of a terrible crisis. Partly a cause and partly an effect, the roots of this crisis in the violent seizure of white commercial farms are not easily unravelled. We discussed not so much the pros and cons of the redistribution models promoted by ZANU-PF but the immediate humanitarian crisis involving some 200,000 farm workers and their families. This could mean that 1.5 million people have lost their livelihood as a result of the violent land seizures. Some of them are still on the farms, but their existence is precarious. The announcement that the Zimbabwean Government has decided to extend citizenship to all SADC citizens who were resident in the country at independence in April 1980 is obviously to be welcomed and should be of some (belated) help to farm workers.
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The immediate priority is to address the humanitarian disaster and re-establish the rule of law and good governance. Urgent measures must be found to assist displaced farm workers to find shelter and alternative means of livelihood. If resettled small-scale farmers are to bring the land back into production, they will require security of tenure, basic social services, training, agricultural inputs, and reliable access to markets. The ability to provide any of these things will be severely constrained by the costs involved and the scarcity of human resources following the exodus of technical and professional personnel from government and NGOs over the last few years.
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Once stability has been restored, and violence ended, the competing claims to land by commercial farmers, farm workers, new settlers, and the State must be arbitrated and disputes addressed equitably, impartially and quickly. The international donor community should give generous assistance to efforts to ensure a sustainable settlement to the land question in Zimbabwe. Underlying human rights issues, economic policy, food security concerns, and proposals made in earlier land policy documents, must be brought back onto the table. A concern to redress historical injustices and the racial imbalance in land rights must however continue to be a guiding principle of any programme that seeks a sustainable long term solution.
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We also debated whether or not there is also a land crisis in South Africa and Namibia. Each country is so different from its neighbour that it could be said that the only common factor is the inheritance of colonially produced ‘white-black’ schism in land access. The result is that ‘the land question’ is mainly (and understandably) addressed in a redistributive context, but we need to draw lessons from the other countries in the region in order to avoid the kind of catastrophic collapse that has occurred in Zimbabwe.
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There was certainly a feeling that neither South Africa nor Namibia was any closer to finding solutions and that grave consequences could await both countries if the current impasse was allowed to continue. The cost of taking no effective action could be very high indeed. The political will to get to grips with land reform is apparently lacking and perhaps best understood in the context of other, more acute concerns facing these governments.
Cyclical patterns of land reform in the region
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A cyclical element is evident in land reform policy in the region. An initially strong political commitment to land redistribution or confirming the land rights of local people has been followed by a switch of emphasis to so-called economic goals, rather than the eradication of landlessness and/ or poverty.
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This cyclical element is recognisable in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia with regard to land redistribution, and in Zambia and Mozambique with regard to tenure reform. Indeed, debates about land reform everywhere have seen a confrontation between those who believe that land reform must be centred on the redistribution of ownership (or land rights over) productive agricultural land in favour of the rural poor, and those opposed to extensive redistribution who wish the reform to focus on measures to raise agricultural productivity and/or create a new class of (black) African commercial farmers.
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The policy cycle relates to changes in the balance of influence of the landless lobby on the one hand and that of landowners and commercial farmer organisations on the other. Elite interests – landed or otherwise - tend to obtain ascendancy over the medium to longer term. They lobby governments with arguments about the importance of improving food production, of export-revenue earning, of sustaining farm employment and environmental management. This feeds into a debate in the media about the purpose of land reform and whether the focus should be land redistribution for the landless masses or for fewer people ‘who have the potential to contribute to economic growth and national prosperity.’ This may again be followed by a reaffirmation of the needs of the poor before the elections, only to be shelved when the votes of the majority are secured and the practical realities of implementation once again dawn on office holders.
Redistributive land reform
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Below are some of the issues and observations we raised particularly in the context of South Africa, where the land redistribution programme seems to have lost momentum. Some apply with equal force to Namibia.
Land reform, rural development and sustainable livelihoods
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The South African national government as well as some provincial governments have made several attempts to develop a viable rural development strategy. Yet land reform, particularly redistributive reform, has remained an appendage to these policies rather than the ‘central and driving force’ envisaged in the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme of the ANC.
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The misfit between land policy and rural development is most evident where land reform is being pursued by a government primarily as a ‘quasi-constitutional right’ or a means of redressing past injustices, rather than as a basis for sustainable rural livelihoods. Even in the latter case, redistributive land reform is proving to be an extremely difficult process to carry through. Redressing gross racial imbalances in land ownership and access is one thing; recreating sustainable livelihoods on the land is infinitely more difficult.
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In South Africa, a systematic review of land restitution and redistribution projects implemented during the last decade is clearly needed, together with a review of the assumptions on which these models were based. A rigorous re-examination of the economic rationale for redistribution is essential. Research work is already underway and results are expected within the year. Hard evidence is required if current dysfunctional policies are to be challenged and alternative paradigms advanced. Linked to this research, a realistic appraisal of the many and diverse livelihood strategies across the region is needed, together with an assessment of what is actually happening on the ground in deep rural areas as well as peri-urban situations.
Questioning assumptions about the viability of small-scale farms
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There is now a widely received wisdom shared by, amongst many others, the World Bank, Oxfam and Michael Lipton, that small-scale farms are invariably more productive (as well as more equitable) than large-scale one. In the current context of Southern Africa however, the relevance of such assumptions needs to be re-examined. Many of the studies of the comparative efficiency of large and small farms were made on the basis of the use of hired labour on the former as compared with family members on the latter. Over the last ten years, commercial farmers, fearful of the intentions of their employees, and concerned about new laws protecting the rights of farm tenants and the possibility of minimum wage legislation, have responded by fully mechanising field operations which relied on family labour and by hiring a minimum number of seasonal piece-rate workers trucked in by contractors. The result has been a significant increase in returns to management.
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Where rains are both unpredictable and unreliable, which is over much of the region, the mechanised farmer can readily take advantage of favourable soil moisture conditions for land preparation, sowing and subsequent cultivations. This flexibility is not available to small-scale farmers dependent on borrowed oxen or draught animals weakened by fodder shortages during the long dry season. Systematic studies of the performance of land reform beneficiaries over a long period in Zimbabwe reveals that families resettled from the communal areas in the 1980s on redistributed land remain vulnerable to drought.
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And even if small farmers are more productive, making the switch in a violent and unprogrammed way can have disastrous effects on maintaining the supply of food and export earning crops while the transition takes place. Zimbabwe provides ample evidence of this danger.
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The efficiency of small family farms in the utilisation of labour does not necessarily translate into the ability to compete in increasingly dynamic and liberalised markets, where ready access to information and capital favour larger enterprises. Maintaining a competitive edge in global markets, particularly for fruit and other high-value exports, requires large inputs in herbicides, fertilisers and chemical pest control. The high cost of credit and the risks involved in this market constitute enormous barriers to small family farms.
Post-transfer support
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It is now a clichй of agricultural policy that land reform without reforms in support services (farm credit, co-operatives for farm-input supply and marketing, and extension services) will achieve little in terms of redistributive justice and efficiency. However, due to the institutional complexities of the public sectors in Namibia and South Africa, land and agriculture ministries and departments have failed to work together, either at the planning stage or post transfer. Even if cooperation had been better, the knowledge of government extension staff, farm technology and markets for inputs and outputs in South Africa have long been geared towards large farms. If anything has been learned about agricultural development in Africa over the last fifty years, it is that widespread departures from existing systems of production are seldom immediately feasible.
Rural-urban migration patterns
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In South Africa, but also in countries with similar economic geography (e.g. Botswana and Namibia), there has been a remarkably rapid rise in the population of urban and peri-urban areas. The movement away from small-scale agriculture in Botswana, for example, is startling. In less than forty years, urban population has moved from 3% to 52%. This has profound implications for those remaining behind in rural areas – mostly the young and the old and female-headed households. Labour for herding and for ploughing, weeding and other critical tasks is scarce. Reciprocal relations between neighbours have deteriorated with loss of young people and with increased sickness associated with the onset of HIV/AIDS. Similar but less marked trends can be observed in Lesotho and Swaziland, where production in small-scale agriculture is declining rapidly.
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The question therefore needs to be asked, especially in South Africa, which is singularly different in terms of demography, economic complexity and sophistication from all its neighbours - do today’s young people (say 15- 45 years) want to be farmers? If people were to be given a choice between a job and a house in a town or a piece of land for farming, complete with tools and inputs, what would they choose? People clearly and rightly care about the historical injustice and inequality inherent in the current situation, but is land reform what they really want (or need)? If the answer is that some but not all wish to move to towns, it has implications for land policy and the way in which overall inequality is addressed. And again, the question is especially important if an equally high priority is providing a secure food supply to poor urban and peri-urban residents, even if this food is produced mainly by (white) commercial farmers.
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As Botswana is finding, the ’land question’ is also often located amongst peri-urban and housing issues, not rural farmlands. Secure land rights in these areas are perhaps even more important determinants of overall equity and human rights questions and need to be more fully explored and addressed.
Mobilising support for land reform
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With the increasing polarisation of government and civil society in South Africa under the GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution) strategy, a more independent labour movement is emerging. The potency of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the emergence of the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) may presage a new kind of politics. And while it might appear that groups like the LPM are more concerned about urban than rural inequities – the focus of much publicity at the Johannesburg 2002 World Summit – the reality is that rural issues are rarely covered adequately by the media, and closer examination reveals that the LPM and others are trying hard to link rural and urban issues.
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Over the years, the unions of (predominantly white) commercial farmers in the region (e.g. the Commercial Farmers’ Union of Zimbabwe, Agri-SA and the Namibian Agricultural Union) have not been short of advice to governments on how to manage the process of redistributive land reform. The extent to which they could be more actively and practically involved should be explored. There is also need for a constructive dialogue with the private sector, including banks, mining houses and others. In 2001, the influential Business Trust of South Africa commissioned a study to review the options for supporting land reform. This is a possibility worth re-exploring, especially after recent events in Zimbabwe, which have brought most normal business to a complete standstill.
The ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ principle
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This is often mentioned as a constraint to land reform by politicians and NGO land reform advocates. British insistence on this principle was undoubtedly a major source of contention in Zimbabwe’s independence negotiations at Lancaster House in 1979. The independence constitution allowed for compulsory acquisition only of ‘unutilised’ agricultural land, provided market value was paid in hard currency. The British Government, right up to Zimbabwe’s International Donor Conference in 1998, insisted on this principle as a condition for financial support for land acquisition.
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Perhaps the harder part of this principle is the ‘willing seller’ side of the equation, which naturally made it an immediate obstacle to any form of systematic designation of land for redistribution. It was ostensibly for these reasons that the Zimbabwean Government introduced constitutional amendments in 1990 (and passed the Land Acquisition Act, 1992). We heard evidence from several countries however that in fact there is considerable willingness to release land on the part of large scale (white) commercial farmers, especially in the current economic climate, further influenced by developments in Zimbabwe. This would point to promoting dialogue with the commercial farmer lobby, in search of more peaceful and constructive solutions than those now being seen in Zimbabwe.
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The South African Constitution provides for land expropriation, with ‘just and equitable’ (as opposed to market-related) compensation, for a public purpose or in the public interest -which specifically includes land reform. Recently the Department of Land Affairs has begun to develop policy on what is being termed a ‘proactive land reform strategy’ whereby land expropriation could be utilised to obtain suitable land as needed by clearly identified beneficiaries.
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Many international donors now argue that the willing buyer, willing seller principle should be dropped as a condition for development aid for land reform. For example, it was not imposed by any of the eight donors who contributed funds to land reform to South Africa in the period of the Mandela Government (1994-9). Important donors and agencies such as USAID and Agri SA in South Africa do however still insist on the principle being maintained, partly it would seem out of a misplaced fear that dropping it will open the door to arbitrary land seizures.
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If ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ has been a constraint in the past, and is now judged to be irrelevant, it should be dropped from the agenda altogether. We felt that there are several issues around this subject that need more investigation, such as the real nature of the constraint it imposes, and whether it is the supply of land or the other conditions (price, who gets land once it is ‘redistributed’, etc.) that are the real problem.
Land tenure reform in the region
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The time available did not allow a full discussion of the reform of existing tenure arrangements that are not necessarily linked to redistribution goals. We recognised however that it is a crucial issue not only to assure the land rights of the majority of the population in the region, but also because of the potential link between secure land rights, investment, and economic growth. Effective tenure reform is also an important safeguard against creating land or income inequality and related problems in the future.
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Cases like Mozambique also show that even where tenure reform has benefited from good policy and enabling legislation, the surrounding institutional and socio-political context are important determinants of how successful the reform will be in practice. Other legislation – for example covering natural resources use such as forests and mining – can also weaken the impact of more progressive land reform measures.
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In Botswana, there is a longstanding policy of ‘tribalising’ freehold land in those areas adjacent to freehold farms where tribal land is insufficient for community needs. The land purchased by government is reclassified as tribal land and handed over to the local land board to allocate to citizens either as customary land grants or common law leases (or added to communal grazing) in terms of the Tribal Land Act. Because the law and the gazetted regulations are well understood, the allocation of land on the former freehold farms has been straightforward, simply a case of ‘taking down the fences’.
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For a number of reasons, similar procedures have not been possible in either South Africa or Namibia. Governments in these countries have been reluctant to expand the land available in the communal areas in the absence of a transparent system of land administration and because of the disputes that would arise between tribes and chiefs as to who should benefit from such redistribution of land.
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One reason why land tenure reform has not progressed in South Africa is that macro-economic agenda place severe limits on the expansion of the public service, in this case the Department of Land Affairs. But the continuing costs of taking no action are very much higher than would be incurred in recruiting, training and deploying the required number of land administrators.
Land rights of women
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Any discussion of customary land rights raises issues of the unequal land rights of men and women under customary law. Women in rural communities have often been reported as preferring the easier accessibility and lower cost of customary systems, and often have strong rights over specific fields used for food crops and other activities. Nevertheless, what is clear across the region is that, whatever the system, women suffer from strong male bias in relation to land rights, mirrored and exacerbated by male-dominated land administration systems.
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High-level constitutional commitments to gender equality across the region are not matched by practice on the ground. Formal land administration systems are also out of step with developments on gender issues as well as with some of the more progressive approaches towards recognising and working with customary systems. And, when it suits them, men are adept at choosing to follow whichever system – modern or traditional – best suits their interests. Even women from elite groups face difficulties when enforcing their legitimate property rights.
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There is general agreement among land advocacy and women’s rights NGOs that women should have equal opportunities to men when owning land and exercising control over its products. While NGOs in the region have been very effective in bringing these issues to the attention of the public and to politicians, they have been less than successful in obtaining concrete action in the legislatures or advancing concrete policy proposals. Reconciling the interests of women and advancing their rights within tenure systems based on essentially patriarchal customary principles remains a serious challenge.
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Although legal reforms still need to be undertaken, the record of Botswana in securing women’s land rights is creditable. While the matter has yet to be confirmed in a systematic study, there is evidence that the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on women’s land and property rights is less severe than elsewhere, as land boards have been exceptionally sympathetic to the rights of widows and orphans.
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Notwithstanding these apparent pockets of success, across the region there is not enough attention given to mainstreaming gender concerns into land policy and implementation – whether in a customary or more formal context. This comment applies not only to governments and public and customary institutions, but also to many donor and NGO programmes.
Customary land rights and systems
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Notwithstanding the issues raised by securing women’s land rights, there is widespread agreement that to pursue a pro-poor agenda, governments must pay attention to customary tenure rights and land management systems when addressing tenure reform. The private plots and commons found on customary lands provide subsistence to millions of people and, as Mozambique has shown, even years of civil war can fail to damage the legitimacy and relevance of customary land management systems. Local elites and foreign investors are however seeking to secure rights over the best land, with good soils and water, close to markets, through whatever system exists, and eroding rights to customary lands and common property resources. This is the case across the region, where corruption plays a big part in the wider land access picture.
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Many regional land policies fail to adequately address the inherent legitimacy and validity of customary land rights alongside formal or ґmodernґ rights, and to integrate them into a single policy framework. Even where policies do take full account of customary rights and land management systems, ineffective implementation continues to create much uncertainty and conflict in rural areas, and marginalize poor villagers who are left to survive on the bits of more marginal land left them by more powerful groups.
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Our discussion of the lower profile countries – Botswana, Mozambique, Malawi – revealed that there is much to learn from these cases that might be of use in the more polarised and racially divided contexts of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia. Often it is as much about process – who is involved in the policy discussions and subsequent implementation – as it is about the technical content and substance of the resulting programme. Analyses of groups and institutions involved in South Africa revealed this very clearly. A continuing dualism between customary and modern remains a difficult obstacle to overcome in many countries in the region.
HIV/AIDS and land
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The potentially catastrophic impact of HIV/AIDS on land reform policies and state capacity to implement them, not only at present levels of infection, morbidity and mortality, but over the next decade as mortality levels across the region are set to plunge, is only now beginning to feature in policy-linked research and debates across the region. It is a matter for urgent attention, requiring a re-examination of many basic assumptions underpinning land policy work. While there is a relatively large body of work investigating the impact of the pandemic on agrarian livelihoods, very little work has been done on the impact on tenure systems and the cumulative consequences of the pandemic on land systems in the future.
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What we do know is that the effects of HIV/AIDS are unevenly distributed and fall most severely on the poorest and most marginal members of society, who are most vulnerable to losing, forfeiting or alienating their land rights as a result of sickness or death within their families and households. Many of the most marginal households (both male- and female-headed) are likely to break up and disappear altogether. The pandemic may encourage shifts
to new forms of tenure, e.g. rental or increased land sales, as well as new patterns of cropping and land use. The pandemic is bringing the negative impact of aspects of customary law on the livelihoods of women and children into increasingly sharp focus. Across the region, the land rights of women and children are becoming ever more vulnerable to dispossession by patrilineal kin on the death of male household heads.
Donor support to government land reform programmes
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Donors in Southern Africa increasingly see assistance to land reform as politically sensitive and complex, likely to result in negative consequences whatever the moral foundation, and therefore best avoided. In addition, recipient governments have become suspicious that donors, by insisting on a range of conditions – a ‘pro-poor’ focus, the willing buyer, willing seller principle, maintaining economic stability - are using support to land reform as a neo-colonialist ‘Trojan Horse’, which in some cases is also perpetuating racial imbalances in land ownership.
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Unlike other sectors (e.g. education, health, water supply), official development assistance to land reform presents particular problems arising from its volatile, cyclical and politically sensitive nature. Assistance is always likely to be needed in the region, but the nature and intensity of support required will vary from time to time.
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What is clear is that donors should not walk away when things turn sour, but rather tread carefully and maintain a base flow of support. Nor should they give up on promoting a redistribution agenda, notwithstanding the disaster unfolding in Zimbabwe, which seems to have become the reference point in spite of really being the ‘very worst case scenario’.
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Land reform is a long-term iterative process, needing feedback, learning and involvement of many stakeholders. It is also a highly contested one, particularly in the unequal societies of the region. Unequal ownership of land by elites, white or black, is a major cause of poverty and threat to economic development and political stability.
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It may also help to place land reform and land policy generally in the context of the wider economy and overall distribution of wealth, and to ‘deracialise’ the issue by applying less direct wealth distributing measures. The funding of land tenure reform and associated land administration institutions is also likely to be less of a minefield than redistributive land reform and will also constitute support to poverty reduction.
Donor support to civil society initiatives
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A good understanding of the emerging situation is important if donors are to respond readily to requests for assistance. Civil society organisations (research and training institutes, land reform advocacy alliances, legal/paralegal service providers and field-level service NGOs) can be a major source of knowledge and information as well as being effective partners in implementation. The strengthening of civil society during periods of government inaction can have important consequences for later policy development and implementation, as in the recent example of Kenya.
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Civil society can also be vitally important in giving a kick-start to a new government initiative – as it did in South Africa in 1994. The Land Campaign in Mozambique, responsible for disseminating key principles of the 1997 Land Law across the country at local community level, also underlines this role, and also the way in which civil society can redress imbalances in official implementation programmes that are there either by omission or by design.
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The encouragement provided by Oxfam GB to the emergence of land rights advocacy and South-South interchange (in Zambia, Angola, Kenya and Uganda) is an example of what can be achieved with a modest input of funds and access to information and technical support networks.
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The move by bilateral donors to programme aid, partly to avoid the administrative costs of managing many budget lines, has resulted in a significant cut in the income of NGOs. In this context it was proposed, in a regional consultation in Johannesburg in May 2001, that a multi-donor ‘Land Reform Fund’ be established. It was envisaged that, either on their own initiative or at the request of national governments, civil society organisations from within the Southern Africa region would apply to a fund manager for resources to promote and assist the process of land reform.
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Assisted activities would have included: applied research; advocacy, training (formal and non-formal); capacity building; implementation of local-level land reform projects involving small-scale producers; community facilitation, mediation and conciliation; legal advice and assistance; ad hoc technical assistance for land reform including technical assistance to governments for policy analysis of pro-poor strategies to inform the debate as well as implementation. Unfortunately, these proposals ran into political quicksands and power struggles between different regional institutions.
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