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The Southern African Environment provides a comprehensive and
up-to-date description of the countries of the SADC region, Angola,
Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland,
Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The area is one of rapid political,
economic and social change, and each of the 10 country profiles in
this book provides full and detailed information on the physical
and human geography, environmental problems, resource base,
institutional structures for environmental management and the
issues associated with institutional change. Each profile was
drafted by local environmental experts and is based on extensive
fieldwork and research originally commissioned by the Dutch
government. The report provides a unique synthesis of this
richly-endowed but troubled region.
Food security and asset possession of small producers in developing
countries has been severely undermined over many years. The old
primitive accumulation of capital - by seizing resources from
colonies - was only temporarily halted by independence struggles.
Today the advanced capitalist world, whose large scale agriculture
cannot meet its own consumption needs, angles to control the
superior productive capacity of developing countries for both food
and agrofuels. Monopolistic control of food distribution, increased
prices of foods and farm inputs, and transnational capital's
concessioning of land for food and agrofuel production have created
a new scramble for land. At the same time neoliberal reforms have
increased unemployment, deepened debt, led to land and livestock
losses, reduced per capita food production and decreased
nutritional standards. The dominant response to this agrarian
crisis has been to reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry
into volatile world markets and to extend land alienation,
increasing import dependence. This book shows how the peasantry's
increasingly active resistance has the potential to undermine
political stability in third world countries. Patnaik argues that
generating livelihoods and genuine development for the majority
demands the encouragement of labour-intensive petty production, a
rethinking about which agricultural commodities are produced, the
redistribution of the means of food production and increased social
investment in rural development. Food sovereignty requires policies
that defend the land rights of small producers. Voluntary
co-operation will permit economies of scale, higher productivity
and incomes, and allow the mass of the people to live their lives
with dignity.
The Fast Track Land Reform Programme implemented during the 2000s
in Zimbabwe represents the only instance of radical redistributive
land reforms since the end of the Cold War. It reversed the
racially-skewed agrarian structure and discriminatory land tenures
inherited from colonial rule. The land reform also radicalised the
state towards a nationalist, introverted accumulation strategy,
against a broad array of unilateral Western sanctions. Indeed,
Zimbabwe's land reform, in its social and political dynamics, must
be compared to the leading land reforms of the twentieth century,
which include those of Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan, Cuba and Mozambique. The fact that the Zimbabwe case has
not been recognised as vanguard nationalism has much to do with the
'intellectual structural adjustment' which has accompanied
neoliberalism and a hostile media campaign. This has entailed
dubious theories of eneopatrimonialismi, which reduce African
politics and the state to endemic ecorruptioni, epatronagei, and
etribalismi while overstating the virtues of neoliberal good
governance. Under this racist repertoire, it has been impossible to
see class politics, mass mobilisation and resistance, let alone
believe that something progressive can occur in Africa. This book
comes to a conclusion that the Zimbabwe land reform represents a
new form of resistance with distinct and innovative characteristics
when compared to other cases of radicalisation, reform and
resistance. The process of reform and resistance has entailed the
deliberate creation of a tri-modal agrarian structure to
accommodate and balance the interests of various domestic classes,
the progressive restructuring of labour relations and agrarian
markets, the continuing pressures for radical reforms (through the
indigenisation of mining and other sectors), and the rise of
extensive, albeit relatively weak, producer cooperative structures.
The book also highlights some of the resonances between the
Zimbabwean land struggles and those on the continent, as well as in
the South in general, arguing that there are some convergences and
divergences worthy of intellectual attention. The book thus calls
for greater endogenous empirical research which overcomes the
pre-occupation with failed interpretations of the nature of the
state and agency in Africa.
This book compares the trajectories of states and societies in
Africa, Asia and Latin America under neoliberalism, a time marked
by serial economic crises, escalating social conflicts, the
re-militarisation of North-South relations and the radicalization
of social and nationalist forces. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros bring
together researchers and activists from the three continents to
assess the state of national sovereignty and the challenges faced
by popular movements today. They show that global integration has
widened social and regional inequalities within countries,
exacerbated ethnic, caste, and racial conflicts, and generally
reduced the bureaucratic capacities of states to intervene in a
defensive way. Moreover, inequalities between the countries of the
South have also widened. These structural tensions have all
contributed to several distinct political trajectories among
states: from fracture and foreign occupation, to radicalization and
uncertain re-stabilization. This book re-draws the debate on the
political economy of the contemporary South and provides students
of international studies with an important collection of readings.
This empirically grounded study provides a critical reflection on
the land question in Africa, research on which tends to be
tangential, conceptually loose and generally inadequate. It argues
that the most pressing research concern must be to understand the
precise nature of the African land question, its land reforms and
their effects on development. To unravel the roots of land
conflicts in Africa requires thorough understanding of the complex
social and political contradictions which have ensued from colonial
and post-colonial land policies, as well as from Africa's
'development' and capital accumulation trajectories, especially
with regard to the land rights of the continent's poor. The study
thus questions the capacity of emerging neo-liberal economic and
political regimes in Africa to deliver land reforms which address
growing inequality and poverty. It equally questions the
understanding of the nature of popular demands for land reforms by
African states, and their ability to address these demands under
the current global political and economic structures dictated by
neo-liberalism and its narrow regime of ownership. The study
invites scholars and policy makers to creatively draw on the
specific historical trajectories and contemporary expression of the
land and agrarian questions in Africa, to enrich both theory and
practice on land in Africa.
This study represents a first systematic effort to document
Zimbabwe 's new land uses during the years of economic crisis, the
role of the state in promoting them, the differentiation associated
with them, not only between black and white farmers, but also among
them, and the implications of all these for the political economy
of the Zimbabwean land question. The fact that some of the new land
uses avoid redistribution of clearly under-utilised large scale
commercial farms suggests that the Zimbabwean land question will
remain a live political issue for a long time.
Environmental security research in Southern Africa is a young and
eclectic academic endeavour, quite rare in university curricular.
This book represents a methodological framework for policy research
on environmental security in the SADC region. The framework
attempts to develop analytical approaches which can capture
inter-state environmental problems, conflicts and competition which
have been recently growing in the region, and identify ways in
which inter-state collaboration can promote mutually beneficial
enviromental policy development. Amongst the major issues addressed
is the vexed question of land.
What are the issues shaping contemporary African peasant movements?
Are they fundamentally democratic or anti-democratic? Are they
defensive and local in their organization and aspirations or should
they be seen as taking a leading role in a wider process of
economic, social, and political transformation? Are they in the
state's pocket or can they pose a threat to state power? And how do
they fit in with other organs of African civil society, with
overseas donor groups, and with imposed programs of structural
adjustment? In this collection of important new research findings
from all corners of Africa these questions and others are addressed
while adding another dimension to the democratization debate: what
of the real grassroots, the majority of Africa that is rural? Are
modern rural peasant movements relevant to the debate at all or do
they still only engage in what has been called "the politics of
everyday politics," with the "weapons of the weak?"
This book links contemporary debates on land reform with wider
discourses on sustainable development within Africa. Featuring
chapters and in-depth case studies on South Africa and Zimbabwe,
Malawi, Kenya, Botswana and West Africa, it traces the development
of ideas about sustainable development and addresses a new agenda
based on social justice. The authors critically examine
contemporary neoliberal market-led reforms and the legacy of
colonialism on the land question. They argue that debates on
sustainable development should be placed in the context of
structural interests, access and equity, rather than technical
management of land and resources. Additionally, they show that
these structural factors cannot be transformed by institutional
reform based on notions of elective democracy, community
participation, and market-reform, but require a far more radical
programme to redress the injustices of the colonial system that
continue today. The book advocates a commitment to building
sustainable livelihoods for farmers, calling for a redistribution
of land and natural resources to challenge existing economic
relations and frameworks for development.
Rural movements have recently emerged to become some of the most
important social forces in opposition to neoliberalism. From Brazil
and Mexico to Zimbabwe and the Philippines, rural movements of
diverse political character, but all sharing the same social basis
of dispossessed peasants and unemployed workers, have used land
occupations and other tactics to confront the neoliberal state.
This volume brings together for the first time across three
continents - Africa, Latin America and Asia - an intellectually
consistent set of original investigations into this new generation
of rural social movements. These country studies seek to identify
their social composition, strategies, tactics, and ideologies; to
assess their relations with other social actors, including
political parties, urban social movements, and international aid
agencies and other institutions; and to examine their most common
tactic, the land occupation, its origins, pace and patterns, as
well as the responses of governments and landowners. At a more
fundamental level, this volume explores the ways in which two
decades of neoliberal policy - including new land tenure
arrangements intended to hasten the commodification of land, and
new land uses linked to global markets -- have undermined the
social reproduction of the rural labour force and created the
conditions for popular resistance. The volume demonstrates the
longer-term potential impact of these movements. In economic terms,
they raise the possibility of tackling immiseration by means of the
redistribution of land and the reorganisation of production on a
more efficient and socially responsible basis. And in political
terms, breaking the power of landowners and transnational capital
with interests in land could ultimately open the way to an
alternative pattern of capital accumulation and development.
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