Bridging scholarship and struggle: International land conference at UWC calls for alternative property rights

Land activists and scholars have called for unity and better strategies to fight against market-driven property rights. The call was made at an international conference on Land, Life and Society, organised by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) the Land Deals Politics initiative and is taking place at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

In his opening remarks, UWC rector and vice chancellor, Robert Balfour said that South African democracy is still incomplete until endemic poverty is addressed. “Land remains bound to the memory of dispossession and to the ongoing struggle for inclusion and redress. The tensions over land ownership and access remind us that democracy is not complete until it addresses the material conditions that allow people to live with dignity,” he said.

Tanzanian author and academic, Prof Issa Shivji said that the poor in the global south are currently experiencing new forms of alienation in the form of land grabs by corporations. “The third way of alienation is neo-liberalism which comes in the form of land grabs. It’s not dispossession or encroachment but the enclosure of forests to extract resources for bio-engineering and most of all for blue carbon,” he said.

The conference, according to Plaas director, Prof Ruth Hall, is aimed at drawing together local struggles with global perspectives. “The purpose of the conference is to create a space to encourage research and debate that links scholarship and activism. Firstly, our goal is to strengthen an understanding and critique of expanding corporate acquisition and control of farmland, and other agrarian resources and associated types of labour regimes and agrifood systems. Secondly, to strengthen the empirical basis of arguments that alternative smallholder systems of land control and agrarian productions are capable of providing global food needs, but at the same time promoting rural equality and sustainable livelihoods for future generations in democratic rural communities,” she said.

La Via Campesina general coordinator, Morgan Ody said that there is a lot that can be learnt from the French example of land use for public good. “We have private property rights in France but the strategy of the social movements and progressive governments after World War 2 has been to dismantle private property between users and owners. This means that land owners could keep land and receive rent from the farmers who want to work the land but the rent is determined by the public. The land use is also determined by the public. Even if it is your land you might not be the one to use it. It might be given to for example a young farmer. The public also has the right to propose that the land around the cities should be used to grow vegetables directly for the city and not produce tobacco or agrofuels for export,” she said.

Mazibuko Jara from Zabalaza Pathways Institute said that the popular forces and those who could put up a fight against the neoliberal policies around land have been weakened in the southern Africa region, which makes it difficult to form alliances to fight for land. Jara said the labour movement in the region has also been weakened and cannot fight back.

Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development, Mzwanele Nyhontso, said that despite the progress the country has made in land restitution, land tenure reform and land redistribution, it has not been equally shared. “We have made progress, millions of hectares of land have been transferred. Countless families have their rights secured and communities have seen the return of ancestral land. Yet, we know that this is not enough. Land inequality remains stuck. Too much land remains concentrated in few hands. Women, youth and farmworkers remain marginalised. Rural poverty and food insecurity remain deep,” said Nyhontso, who is the president of the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and took the ministerial position last year under the GNU.

What is to be done

A gathering of so many eminent scholars was not short on solutions to the challenges of land reform. Emeritus professor from the University of Dar Es Salaam, Issa Shivji, proposed that there should be shifts from private ownership to collective control of land, a shift away from consent rights to consent obligations and a shift away from community to working people.

Morgan Ody of La Via Campesina said that one of the ways to stop resource extraction from the global south by the global north would be to have agrarian reforms in the global north.

Not reserving his contribution to a lament of the labour movement’s defeat, Jara suggested a strategy of working with the state to gain some reforms with the intent to always go beyond what these reforms gain for workers – even if it means coming into conflict with the state.