A popular narrative holds that land reform has failed. But evidence from a study across four provinces tells a different story. Success is not about land reform alone, but about building capable farmers.
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Siphe Zantsi
Many black smallholder and emerging farmers struggle to access the finance crucial for developing their businesses. The result is persistent inequality in the agricultural sector. What can be done to make it more inclusive?
Amy Thornton
What has democracy meant for married women in the labour market? Married women are more actively seeking work but are still more likely to be unemployed than men. However, the expansion of education in the democratic era has significantly affected how she weighs up her potential wage and her husband’s earnings when deciding whether to look for work.
Justin Visagie
Over the past 10 years, South Africa has created only 130 000 new formal work opportunities on average a year – not nearly enough to absorb the 12 million work seekers currently unemployed. The size of the challenge is such that even if job growth in the formal sector were to grow to three percent per annum, it would take 50 years to wipe out unemployment. So, what are our options?
Talent Nesongano
Each year South Africa commemorates Human Rights Day, marking the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when police opened fire on people protesting against the pass laws. The day invites reflection on the many ways apartheid denied millions of South Africans their rights and opportunities. The passbooks are gone. Job reservation laws are gone. The racially tiered wage schedules are gone. But tax records and payroll data filed as recently as 2018 tell a more unsettling story: the labour market distortions that apartheid’s economic laws had created are still measurably present today, in the very sectors and regions where those laws were enforced.
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Editor's Corner
The latest editions of Econ3x3 feature two timely articles: one on the unemployment crisis – or as the writers put it the “crisis of missing jobs” - the other on the state of SA agriculture at a time when it is under threat by both domestic and foreign naysayers.
The first, by a group of writers associated with the public employment programmes, the Presidential Employment Stimulus and the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative, argue that many have approached the unemployment crisis - particularly youth unemployment – through a faulty lens. Fewer than three million jobs have been created since 2015 – a period when more than four million new jobseekers entered the labour market.
It is time to reframe the question: “An unemployment crisis tends to make us ask: what is wrong with the people who cannot find work? A crisis of missing jobs makes us ask: what is wrong with our society that it cannot create ways for people to contribute even though there is so much work to be done to make South Africa a better place to live in?”
Public employment programmes have been criticized as being an inadequate solution to the unemployment crisis. However, the writers argue, the “employment stimulus has shown… that the state and civil society have the capacity to create higher quality, better paid work that meets growing social and environmental needs..[and] provide work experience,… for a labour market that is unable to do so.”
Also timely, given the misinformation about the “targeting” of white farmers, is the measured article by Wandile Sihlobo about the state of South African agriculture.
Democracy has been good for the sector, he argues: it has more than doubled output since 1994 and last year the country was the 32nd-largest agricultural exporter world-wide. True, it faces serious challenges, including crime and inept municipalities; it is also true that land-reform projects have stumbled, largely due to the “inertia” of the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development.
But the big picture tells us that South African agriculture has “benefited from its connectivity with the world since 1994.” It is as much a message to domestic doomsayers as it is to foreign critics: “The stories we tell about ourselves and the country matter. They shape views domestically, and how others outside view us.”
Pippa Green