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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Contract Farming, Community Development, and the Politics of Productions among Small-Growers in KwaZulu-Natal |
Author: | Munro, William A. |
Year: | 1996 |
Periodical: | African Rural and Urban Studies |
Volume: | 3 |
Issue: | 3 |
Pages: | 21-61 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | contract farming small farms Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Labor and Employment Development and Technology Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Economics and Trade |
Abstract: | This paper assesses the potential for growers' organizations to promote community development and empowerment by examining the social relations of contract production among sugar and timber small-growers in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Milling companies, seeking to gain access to land outside the freehold sector and to reduce their labour costs, are promoting contract schemes with farmers occupying old bantustan land under 'traditional tenure'. The companies see the contract operation as not only generating economic growth, employment and entrepreneurship, but also as promoting 'community development and empowerment', a view which accords with the objectives of the government's rural development strategy. But the capacity of contract farming to underwrite rural empowerment is profoundly shaped by the political dynamics that structure the organization of production under contract arrangements. The social networks through which contract growers manage their access to land, labour, and capital inputs generate local power relations that reach beyond growers' relationships with agribusiness, and underpin flexible arrangements for resource utilization which shape local-level social conflicts. Any developmental initiative that seeks to secure growers' organizations as the institutional focus for rural development and empowerment must be able to respond to these local political dynamics. Bibliogr., notes, ref. |