Below is the opening paragraphs for “Feeding the Farmers First” by Terry Leahy.
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Initially, there’s huge government inputs, but over time, the government input becomes less and less and then the community becomes more and more. The purpose must be to teach them to fish, not to give fish to them every day, every day, every day, like that. (Marcus)[1]
One of the great puzzles of development work is the way money can easily be spent without much result. In South Africa, government development work in rural villages is oriented to food security and sustainable agriculture. As in other developing countries, the neo-liberal approach “advocates ‘development through enterprise’ and emphasizes business models driven by a profit motive that engage the poor as producers and consumers” (Karnani, 2009: 76).
In the former “homelands” of South Africa, rural poverty goes hand in hand with communal ownership of land. Unemployment in the rural areas, taking into account all those who are discouraged from seeking work, is about 60 per cent and this shows no signs of changing in the near future. Over 70 per cent of poor people live in the rural areas and half of these are “chronically poor” (Cousins, 2007: 222). This rural poverty is also experienced as food insecurity and nutritional deficiencies; in 2000 about 35% of the total population were suffering from food insecurity and up to 27% of young children were suffering from stunting as a result of food insufficiency (Department of Agriculture 2002: 22-23). In this context both government and charitable NGOs operate to intervene to relieve poverty. As far as agriculture is concerned, the approach taken to village projects can be characterized as
“entrepreneurialism”. The aim of almost all projects is nothing less than to turn every poor villager into an entrepreneur, running a (very) small agricultural business competing on the market to sell their agricultural products. Typically, this is aim is to be realized by a small agricultural cooperative, whose members are recruited from the “poorest of the poor” within the village.
This entrepreneurial approach comes out of long standing policy settings, which I have discussed in previous chapters. In this approach, growth in the agricultural commercial economy is expected to provide the poor with both income and employment, and this can only happen with a change from subsistence to commercial strategies. As previous chapters have also explained, these entrepreneurial projects have not actually worked to relieve poverty or ensure food security. What all this suggests is the necessity to actually fund initiatives that will support subsistence strategies and increase the productivity of subsistence. This chapter is concerned with the ideological barriers to such a policy change.
The most common form of project in the rural villages today is the “community group entrepreneurial project”, an attempt to relieve rural poverty by engaging the “poorest of the poor”, as they are often described, in an agricultural enterprise to be carried out on their own community land. The intention is to initiate a market based cooperative that can provide jobs and well being for the rural poor and relieve dependency on the welfare system – in this way developing capitalist enterprise, providing poverty relief, maintaining community ownership and bottom up participatory development all at the same time.
The unfortunate reality is that these projects are rarely successful in the long term and more often fail with great acrimony and bitterness all round. As I have argued, there are a number of fundamental causes for this failure. Despite this, attempts to make this model work continue unabated and it is useful to look at the “entrepreneurialist” ideology that informs these continued failed attempts. In looking at the viewpoints of members of South Africa’s new middle class we can see the tensions between a genuine desire to help the rural poor, and a tendency to reach for solutions which would appropriate community land for small business entrepreneurs. This approach can be understood by reflecting on the formative experiences of South Africa’s new middle class and by noting the powerful cultural forces that work to support this ideology, not just for this middle class itself but for the community more broadly.
[1] Marcus is an agricultural officer from the National Department of Agriculture interviewed in 2006. Pseudonmyms are given for all interviewees.
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