In the Shadow of Policy. Robert Ross
restructured and deregulated. Unemployment rates increased because the economy failed to absorb new entrants into the formal labour market, and existing jobs were lost due to retrenchments in the private and public sector. As a result, social grants and old age pensions became a major source of income. As the size of the grant has increased over the years, these recipients have gradually achieved the status of ‘earners’. In some areas, widows account for 80 per cent or more of the beneficiaries. Consequently, old age pensions are often referred to as widows’ pensions (Sagner 2000: 547). The predominance of pensioners in the rural areas prompted Beinart (2001) to coin the term ‘pensionariat’. Pensions and grants support three generations in many homesteads (Lund 2009; Van Averbeke and Hebinck 2007). Over time, grants have become a major component of the monetary economy in many rural villages, varying in degree of importance amongst homesteads. This does not mean that land and/or food production is unimportant. In many homesteads food is grown to supplement wages and grants, and for petty cash (chapters 14–18, this volume; Aliber and Hart 2009; De Wet 2011; Hart 2007).
Conclusion
This chapter has drawn attention to the birth of a range of policy measures that, taken together, have shaped (but not determined) past and present agrarian development processes. A common thread has been the continuous reliance of the state on expert discourses of development. Expert consultants and scientists have come to play a significant role in the identification of key resources and how to deploy them in development models with broader application. This has allowed experts to give direction to pre-apartheid, apartheid and post-apartheid agrarian policy and to shape the domain of the applied agrarian sciences.
Another common element in agrarian and rural development policies is the consistently held premise that modern technologies, markets and related institutions represent the only relevant and productive path for development. This is manifested in the noted ideological shift from a human rights perspective to productionism and rationalism. This, in turn, can be explained by the influence on key policymakers of the commercial farming lobby and economists advocating a conventional linear model of agricultural development uplifting the emergent farmers from subsistence to commercial producers. Most policies are derived from what might be called ‘received wisdoms’ (Leach and Fairhead 2000) commonly based on untested assumptions about empirical reality. It is important, therefore, to question the nature of the knowledge that informs current agrarian reform and rural development policies, as well as the quality and quantity of service delivery and the slow pace of land restitution and redistribution.
A significant issue is that the productivist discourse that underlies these does not take sufficiently into account that the state’s social policies have been by far the most significant factor in (rural) development and that the role of agriculture, as narrowly defined by experts, has diminished dramatically. What this means for revitalising agriculture under the banner of the current CRDP is a critical question.
The trend that has emerged over the years is that more than ever, state and expert notions sanction projects or elements of projects both before and after a project has been established or a programme has been launched. Land reform increasingly is couched in terms of the conventional transfer of knowledge, manifested in the advice from expert-consultants, mentorship programmes and transformed institutional arrangements, as providing access to markets. Land reform, as Ben Cousins argues in chapter 3, is not meaningfully engaging with agrarian reform. After all these years, land and agrarian reforms are still at the crossroads.
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