Bernstein-2013-Journal of Agrarian Change

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Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 13 No. 1, January 2013, pp. 2346.
Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since

1994: Natural, Simply Capitalism
HENRY BERNSTEIN
The paper provides a survey of commercial agriculture in South Africa since 1994. It
emphasizes, first, how effectively organized agriculture positioned itself for the new dispensation, with the help of the last apartheid government, and, second, the importance of the
removal of limits on the international mobility of South African capital and commodities
imposed on the apartheid regime. The lacunae and ambiguities of the African National
Congress concerning land and agricultural policy during the political transition of 19904
and since then in government are also important here.The paper considers transformation(s)
with respect to farm labour, regulating agribusiness, and land reform, black farming, and
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE, specifically AgriBEE). It concludes that the course of
South African agriculture and agricultural policy since 1994 has done little, if anything, to
transform the circumstances of the dispossessed rural and urban classes of labour whose
crises of social reproduction remain grounded in the inheritances of racialized inequality.
Keywords: agribusiness, capitalist farming, South Africa, transformation
INTRODUCTION
During the negotiated transition from apartheid between 1990 and 1994, the African National
Congress (ANC) had little in the way of economic strategy for the moment it assumed
government office. As one ANC advisor put it at the time: From 1955 until the unbanning of
the ANC in 1990, the economic policy of the ANC remained the same . . . What economic
thinking existed was contained in general documents and manifestos (McMenamin 1992, 245).
This deficit was especially glaring in relation to land and agrarian questions, given the centrality
of dispossession to South African history, the formation of its organized agriculture (standard
code for white farming) and supply of black labour to the countrys farms, mines and factories.
The principal item in the ANCs 1955 Freedom Charter was the distribution of land to the
tiller, declared during the construction of grand apartheid.
Forty years later, agrarian structure had a different shape and, in contrast to the ANC,
organized agriculture had been busily, and effectively, repositioning itself for a post-apartheid
dispensation. One example was a creeping deregulation from the late 1980s or earlier, and
accelerating during the transition from 1990 to 1994, above all to dismantle the different kinds
Henry Bernstein, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University
of London, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: henrybernstein@hotmail.co.uk
I am grateful to Neo Chabane, Mapato Rakhudu and Simon Roberts for permission to cite an unpublished
conference paper and a forthcoming revised version; to Amelia Genis and Ben Cousins for suggesting useful ideas
and sources and for their comments on earlier drafts; and to Bridget OLaughlin, Pauline Peters, Peter Gibbon and
several anonymous referees for their comments; the usual disclaimers apply. The quote in the title borrows from
one of South Africas biggest farmers, Kallie Schoeman of Schoeman Boerdery: It is natural, simply capitalism . . .
you must get bigger, get better, or get out. (Financial Mail, 19 January 2012).
2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
24 Henry Bernstein
of commodity-based state marketing schemes, with their administered producer prices and
other forms of subsidy key to the fortunes of white farmers earlier in the period of apartheid.1
Such deregulation was, of course, favoured by the World Bank, which presented itself to fill the
gaping hole of ANC agricultural policy. Another example was the conversion of the biggest
agricultural co-operatives into companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE),
enabling them to reinvent themselves as private agribusiness corporations, in effect. In tandem
with these changes, the South African Agricultural Union (SAAU), that had put much of the
organized into the relations between organized agriculture and the apartheid state, subsequently rebranded itself in 1999 as a colour-blind Agri South Africa (Agri SA) for the new
conditions of the rainbow nation.
What of land reform policies and encouragement of small for which, read black
farmers more generally? This was the gap filled by World Bank prescriptions. Indeed, the 1994
ANC election pledge to redistribute 30 per cent of commercial (white) farmland in 5 years
used the target proposed by the World Bank. Further, the Bank created a convivial connection
with a group at the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) established, as part of late
apartheids reform endeavours, to revive development in the bantustans. A principal emphasis
was to dismantle bantustan agricultural corporations as a step towards freeing up the energies
of small farmers.2 The World Bank, its verligte (enlightened) allies at the DBSA, and the usual
suspects in the ranks of international consultancy, dominated the policy discourses, publications
and proposals of the then ANC think tank, the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre (LAPC)
concerning structural adjustment of agriculture, especially marketing and land reform.
In the conjuncture of transition, two principal reform scenarios were urged on the impending democratic government.3 One was the argument for (orderly) land redistribution and small
farmer development, to which Michael Lipton contributed his authority (Lipton 1996). The
other was provided by the report of the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG), commissioned by the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). MERG
advocated a suitably reformed large farm path of development:
. . . there are immense possibilities for putting economic pressure on farmers, by expanding, eliminating, and redirecting the array of state expenditures and tariffs affecting their
incentives. The purpose of such pressures should be to encourage all farmers to begin to
invest in a wage labour intensive, technologically dynamic and internationally competitive
farm production structure. (MERG 1993, 194)
Technological dynamism and international competitiveness are certainly prominent in the
discourse of government policy and of (re-)organized agriculture some 18 years after the
formal end of apartheid in 1994. Whether agrarian change since then has generated additional
waged jobs is another matter, as is the fate of hopes pinned to small farmer development
effected through land redistribution and other measures (see further below).
This strategic move was combined with others to strengthen (white) commercial agriculture for a postapartheid dispensation. Continuing state support, notably in the form of drought relief from 1983 and culminating in the massive R3.2 billion handout following the 1992 drought, was not so much to assist farmers as those
institutions that held their debt, among which a handful of summer grain co-operatives were pre-eminent. The
fundamental purpose was supporting capital formation by the co-operatives and maintaining land values. Farm
debt grew from R837 million in 1980 to some R16 billion by 1990, the greatest part accounted for by maize
farmers. The collapse of that debt would have had a serious impact on a financial system that was already under
severe strain (Bernstein 2004).
2
In line with earlier World Bank structural adjustment policies elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, in effect.
3
There is more detailed critical discussion of the two scenarios in Bernstein (1998).
Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 25

The overview presented in this paper suggests that measures to safeguard capitalist farming
and agriculture in the new South Africa following the abolition of the institutional apparatus
of apartheid were anticipated and initiated in the final years of apartheid, and have continued
since 1994. Freed from the former constraints of trade sanctions on agricultural exports, and of
barriers to inward investment by international agribusiness and to outward investment by South
African farmers and firms elsewhere in Africa and further afield, production and accumulation
have grown, accompanied (or accomplished) by concentration of both farming and agribusiness, technical change, and the reduction of the farm labour force.
CHANGE SINCE 1994
South Africa has a land area of some 122 million hectares, across seven climatic regions, from
Mediterranean to subtropical to semi-desert. Only 13 per cent of land can be used for crop
production, of which one-fifth is high-potential arable land. This is because it is a dry country,
subject to periodic severe droughts.The 500 millimetre rainfall line running northsouth bisects
South Africa virtually in the middle; only 10 per cent of the country receives an average 750
millimetres or more of rainfall a year. And it has been getting drier in the past 30 years, as a
result of rising temperatures and adverse changes in rainfall patterns (RSA 2011, 9). Over 60 per
cent of water used is for farming, with about 1.3 million hectares under irrigation.
The main branches of commercial agricultural production field crops, livestock and
horticulture in the standard classification reflect both the distribution of water, soils and other
ecological conditions of farming, and the long histories of white settlement and black dispossession.The principal field crops are maize, wheat, sugarcane and soya beans.The main livestock
products are red meat and poultry. About 80 per cent of cattle are installed in feed lots prior
to slaughter, and commercial poultry is largely produced in industrial conditions. Horticulture,
especially for export, centres on citrus (pre-eminently oranges), apples, pears, avocados and table
grapes, as well as wine production.
From 19945 to 20023, the area farmed declined by 10 per cent (RSA 2010, 21). Reduced
plantings of grains, especially maize (Gibbon 2011, 11), that predate 1994 have continued, albeit
with some recent conversion from maize to soya beans, and with some new sugarcane
plantations and (black) out-grower schemes established in Mpumalanga (ibid., 11).4 The marked
growth in the value of horticultural exports, including wine, is due more to investment in
(re-)planting with improved cultivars and other yield-enhancing investments rather than expansion of the cultivated area, although this has occurred.5
The contribution of agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing to GDP declined from about
5 per cent in 1990 to under 3 per cent in 20057, well below the average for middle-income
countries due to the weight of mining, and rapid growth of services, in South Africas economy.
The value of commercial agriculture has grown in absolute terms, albeit without any consistent
trend, reflecting fluctuations in rainfall and the exchange rate of the rand.
Land Distribution
South Africa has one of the most extreme distributions of land in the world. In 1994, white
farms occupied 85.8 million hectares, 86 per cent of rural land, of which 10.6 million hectares
4
Sugar has a distinctive position in South African agriculture, and remains the only commodity which . . . still
benefits from state-imposed price controls (Hall 2011b, 8).
There have also been some shifts in the spatial distribution of different branches, on which see the following
sections.
26 Henry Bernstein
were under arable cultivation. About 15 million people, roughly half of the African population,
lived in the bantustans on some 14 million hectares, one-sixth of the area fenced by 60,000
white farms.
By 2010, less than 5 per cent of commercial farm land (roughly 4 million hectares) had been
transferred through land reform. According to the Review of Agricultural Policies and Support
Instruments (RSA 2010), part of the Presidency Fifteen Year Review Project, between 2002 and
2006 the number of South African households with access to land for farming purposes
declined by 21 per cent, from 1.8 million to 1.4 million.The relative decline was even greater:
from just over 15 per cent of all South African households to 10.65 per cent, with the largest
losses by those with land parcels of less than one hectare in the former bantustans, now
communal areas (RSA 2010, 23). However, Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 1, 86) note that Establishing
basic facts and figures regarding smallholders is difficult. The Annual Abstract of Agricultural
Statistics . . . has no figures for the numbers of smallholders . . . [nor] for the amount of
agricultural land in the former homelands (. . . where the vast majority of smallholders are
located).6
This means that the numbers of black farmers and the land area that they farm in the former
bantustans remain highly uncertain and contested, subject to radically different assessments in
debates about land reform.
Farming
The 60,000 or so commercial (white) farms of 1994 had reduced to 45,000 by 2002, according
to that years Census of Commercial Agriculture, published in 2005. This suggests a trend of
concentration of landed property that predated 1994 but accelerated in the first decade after the
end of apartheid.7
Table 1 shows that in 2002, 673 farms (1.6 per cent) produced a third of total gross
commercial farm income, and 1,348 farms (5 per cent) more than half.8 The largest enterprises
are generally in areas of high agricultural productivity, and are major field crop producers,
irrigated and export-oriented horticulture enterprises or intensive livestock enterprises. Most
operate on more than one non-contiguous farm and sometimes on rented land too. They are
typically incorporated as companies, and hire specialized management.The third of commercial
farms with a turnover of between R300,000 and R2 million are mostly family owned (though
often incorporated) and family managed; some also rent in land. They are generally extensive
livestock enterprises in drier areas, medium-scale crop producers or smaller irrigated farms.The
50 per cent of commercial farms with a turnover of less than R300,000 belong to part-time
farmers; many of them are weekend farms in peri-urban areas and game ranches, so-called
lifestyle farms.9
Technical, organizational and spatial changes in commercial farming manifest the combined
effects of growing farm concentration, the removal of former subsidy and other support
mechanisms (including pan-territorial pricing for grains) and trade liberalization. The
6
They prefer to construct their estimates of numbers of smallholders from data in the annual Labour Force
Surveys; see their Appendix 2: Overview of secondary statistical sources and their advantages and disadvantages,
and further below.
7
More recently, the Financial Mail (19 January 2012) gave a figure of 37,000 commercial farms, and cited a
prediction by the General Manager for Agribusiness of Absa Bank that this would reduce further to some 15,000
over the next 20 years.
8
This paragraph summarizes the gloss of the table by Vink and Van Rooyen (2009, 323).
9
This number may include some black recipients of funds under the governments programme for Land Reform
and Agricultural Development (LRAD), introduced in 2001 (Ben Cousins, pers. comm.).

Table 1. Commercial farm enterprises: size and distribution of farm income, 2002
Income (R per year)
Number of farms
Cumulative
(percentage)
Gross farm income

(R000 per year)
Cumulative
(percentage)
>10 m
4 m9,999,999
2 m3,999,999
1 m1,999,999
300,000999,999
< R300,000
Total
673
1,675
3,041
5,214
11,805
23,428
45,818
1.5
5.1
11.7
23.1
48.9
100
17,850,383
10,330,424
5,056,986
7,351,291
5,335,646
7,404,322
53,329,052
33.5
52.8
62.3
76.1
86.1
100
Source: Vink and van Rooyen (2009, 32).10
Presidency Review notes a variety of diversification strategies by commercial farmers in terms

of investment, income and assets, including investment by large farmers in different branches
(RSA 2010, 30).11
There have been some spatial shifts in horticulture in response to expanding export
opportunities.12 In the dairy industry, deregulation generated a relative shift towards coastal
provinces with more suitable pastures, as well as concentration, with a reduction of 41 per cent
in the number of commercial dairy farmers from 1997 to 2006 (Chabane et al. 2008).13
The Presidency Review (RSA 2010, 30) makes several salient points concerning changes in
grain farming: on-farm shifts to better-quality soils; a shift in production out of more marginal
areas, such as the western parts of the North West and Free State provinces (mainly maize), and
the north-western and south-eastern parts of the Western Cape (wheat); and marked shifts to
minimum and low-tillage production systems, and in some cases no-till practices, in the face of
cost-price inflation for farm machinery and fuel (as well as seasonal inputs such as fertilizers,
insecticides and herbicides). With the maize area planted reduced by about 40 per cent since
1980 (from 5 to 3 million hectares), total production has not declined, however. Indeed, the
maize crop in 2010 was the largest since 1982. The Review (2010, 11) attributes this to an
unspecified greater efficiency, and does not mention the rapid uptake of genetically modified
(GM) maize seed in recent years. GM cultivars were introduced commercially in South Africa
10
In a subsequent table on Farmer typologies,Vink and Van Rooyen (2009, 35) classify commercial farms with
annual turnover of more than R2 million, R300,00 to R2 million, and less than R300,000 as respectively large,
medium and small commercial on private property.
11
Widely cited examples of diversification of commercial farmers in downstream activities are the increasing
proportion of the maize crop (with the highest estimate at 30 per cent) now processed by small-scale mills, both
on- and off-farm; and an increasing number of smaller, mostly on-farm, abattoirs in rural areas (RSA 2010, 356),
liberated from the grip previously exerted by the summer grain co-operatives and the monopoly red meat
Vleissentraal, respectively tied into the Maize and Red Meat Boards. These instances are often cited, I suggest,
because they indicate a levelling of the previous playing field that deregulation leads to deconcentration with
new opportunities for black rural consumers and, most optimistically, emergent black farmers too. However, they
concern simple food processing activities with relatively minor barriers to entry, and such positive shifts are more
significant as new opportunities for some commercial (white) farmers and much less significant than other trends
towards the concentration of market power indicated below.
12
For example, new table grape production areas along the Orange River in the interior, and in wine areas of
the Western Cape; new wine grape production areas in the Western Cape, and a rapid expansion in wine grape
production in the Southern Cape (RSA 2010, 378).
13 The dairy industry has also seen the entry of multinational processing firms such as Parmalat, whose
modus operandi in its native Italy is examined in a withering account by van der Ploeg (2008, ch. 4).
28 Henry Bernstein
in the late 1990s, using imported technologies. In 2008, the proportions of the total maize area
planted with GM seed were 56 per cent for white maize and 72 per cent for yellow maize (plus
88 per cent for soya beans and 96 per cent for cotton; ACB 2009, 47).14
Sources of credit to commercial farmers have shifted from previous government funding,
both direct (through the Land Bank and Agricultural Credit Board) and indirect (through the
co-operatives), to private banks and other lenders (such as AFGRI, below), especially through
mortgage financing, and without any apparent adverse impact on farm investment (RSA 2010,
523). Profit rates in commercial farming dipped from 1990 to 2002, but have recovered in the
past decade, to exceed the sector interest rate in most years: farming has thus become more
profitable (RSA 2010, 10; but see further below).
Agribusiness
The functioning of domestic markets as well as international trade (below) has been affected by
the dismantling of the state marketing system, if not always in ways anticipated, or at least
advertised, by the advocates of a brave new world of deregulated (normalized) commercial
agriculture. That dismantling began before 1994, as noted, and was completed with the passage
of the Marketing of Agricultural Products Act of 1996 (RSA 1992b; Bayley 2000; RSA 2010,
348), accompanied or followed by various institutional and organizational changes. The
expectation was that such changes would create healthy competition in the spaces opened up
by abolition of de jure monopolies and the de facto monopolies that flourished in their protective
shadow.
Agribusiness understood here as corporate activity upstream of farming (supply of seeds,
fertilizer, agrichemicals, machinery) and downstream (milling and other processing, marketing
and distribution) was already highly concentrated in some branches and commodities by the
end of apartheid. It has become generally, if not comprehensively, more concentrated since
1994, with further processes of vertical integration, consolidation of market power, and private
regulation.15 This is illustrated by Chabane et al. (2008) with reference to food grains, milling
and baking, dairy products and poultry.16
At the same time, there have been some changes in key players (and their guises) in
agribusiness. One kind of change was noted earlier, namely the privatization of the giant
summer grain co-operatives, key pillars of organized agriculture during apartheid. This meant,
in effect, the privatization of their physical assets (notably grain silos, plus maize mills, feed mills,
feedlots and so on) and financial assets accumulated from four decades of state subsidy (Amin
14
White maize is grown for human consumption in the form of maize meal, yellow maize for processing into
animal feeds. For more detail on GM maize seed in South Africa, and sharply differing views of its impact, see,
inter alios, Gouse et al. (2005) and ACB (2010).
15
The two giant sugar corporations, Illovo and Tongaat-Hulett, practice high levels of vertical integration of
cane production with upstream and especially downstream activity. They dominate South Africas sugar sector
and are increasingly active in the Southern African region (see further below), with a recent strong interest in
biofuel production (and subsidies to support it).
16
Neo Chabane and her co-authors worked for the Competition Commission but wrote the paper cited in their
private capacities. Their evidence was derived from Commission investigations into collusive and other anticompetitive company behaviour, including proposed mergers referred to the Commission, which limits the scope
of their examples and analysis (see further below). Contrary to conventional notions of regulation, applied only
to the actions of states, Chabane et al. (2008) use the term private regulation, an indispensable concept for political
economy; see, for example, Friedmann (1993) on the reshaping of the world food economy since the 1970s, and
Bernstein (1996c) on South Africa. Chabane et al. (forthcoming) note that there is almost no reference to issues
of market power in the Presidency Review (RSA 2010).

Table 2. Examples of agribusiness concentration
Activity
Major companies
Market share (percentage)
Vertical integration
Animal feeds
Top three: Epol, Meadow

Feeds, AFGRI
75 (of poultry feeds)
Poultry production
Poultry
Top two: Rainbow Chicken,

Astral
63
Animal feeds
Maize and
wheat milling
Top four: AFGRI, Tydstroom

(Pioneer), Epol (Rainbow),
Meadow Feeds (Astral)
90
Baking, maize meal,

other cereal
products
Source: Derived from Chabane et al. (2008).
and Bernstein 1996). The most prominent example is AFGRI, the name by which the former
East Transvaal Cooperative (OTK) is now listed on the JSE.17 AFGRI advertises itself as
South Africas leading agricultural services and foods business offering a wide range of
physical and intellectual inputs to farmers, producers and users of agricultural products. As
a transforming force in the business of agriculture, AFGRI offers farming clients banking,
broking, logistics, trading and retail services and we are producers of animal feeds, poultry,
proteins and oil.18
AFGRI appears in Table 2 as one of the big three in poultry feeds and one of the big four in
maize and wheat milling. It also has interests in seed and pesticide production (Table 3),
provides financial services to commercial farmers, and is a major player in maize trading on the
South African Futures Exchange (SAFEX). SAFEX was established in 1990 with a financial
markets division; its agricultural markets division was added in 1995 two dates that again
indicate how busy South African capital was in (re-)positioning itself in the years around the
political transition.
Mergers and acquisitions so characteristic of agribusiness concentration globally in recent
decades have become a feature of AFGRIs business strategy, as they are of longer established vertically integrated South African corporations that feature in Table 2. They are also
marked in agri-input branches since 1994, not least with the entry of international seed,
fertilizer and agrochemical corporations indicated in Table 3. It should be noted that reliable
information on market shares in the seed and pesticide industries is hard to come by, and
matters can be further complicated by licensing, interlocking share purchase deals and other
aspects of conglomeration.19
17
OTK, based in Bethal, was one of the two biggest summer grain co-operatives; the other was Senwes, the
Central West Transvaal Cooperative, based in Klerksdorp, which is the single largest trader of white maize, wheat
and sunflower seed (Chabane et al. forthcoming, 11). OTKs transition to private agribusiness corporation was
made possible by provisions of the 1993 Co-operatives Amendment Act, another (apartheid) government move
during the political transition that was little remarked in the fraught circumstances of the time.
18
See http://www.afgri.co.za (accessed 9 February 2012).
19
For example, Pannar has the largest number of varieties in the South African GM seed market, mostly licensed
from Monsanto; Plasskem, the leading South African pesticide producer, is a subsidiary of Chemical Services Ltd
(Chemserve) in turn controlled by AECI, a publicly listed South African company with its historic roots in the
mining industry, and currently planning to expand its international operations.What follows is largely derived from
the valuable report by the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB 2009) on biotechnology and agricultural input
value chains in South Africa.
30 Henry Bernstein
Table 3. Leading companies in seeds, fertilizers and pesticides operating in South Africa
Company
Pannar
Monsanto
Syngenta
DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred
AFGRI
Hygrotech
Sakata Seed
Sasol
Omnia
Yara
Foskor
Plaaskem
Bayer
Dow Agroscience
Volcano Agrosciencesa
MakhteshimAgan
Universal Crop Production
BASF
Villa Crop Protection
Seed
GM seed
#
#
#
+
+
#
#
#
#
+
#
+
Fertilizers
Pesticides
#
+
#
+
+
+
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#
Source: Adapted from ACB (2009, 567).

Key: #, major player; +, secondary player.
a
Joint venture.
Non-South African multinational companies and their subsidiaries are in italics.
The biggest seed production company is Pannar, a South African corporation that operates
globally. Monsanto is second primarily through acquisitions, having purchased two of South
Africas largest seed companies, Sensako and Carnia, in 1999 and 2000. By 2002, Monsanto,
Pannar and Pioneer between them shared 90 per cent of the market for grain seeds (maize,
wheat and sorghum). In 2009, by its own account, Monsanto had a 50 per cent share in the
maize seed market.
The fertilizer industry, historically connected with mining supplies companies, had grown
under state protection until the 1980s. Following deregulation, South Africa became a net
importer of fertilizer for the first time in around 2000. Norsk Hydro, one of the worlds leading
fertilizer corporations, purchased Kynoch (now Yara SA), and closed down its urea plants, so
that all urea is now imported, as is all potash and 4060 per cent of nitrogen for fertilizer
production. Imports as a proportion of domestic fertilizer needs rose from less than 20 per cent
in 1990 to over 65 per cent in 2008 (Grain SA 2011, iv). Today, Sasol Agri (the sole producer
of ammonia), Omnia and Yara are the dominant suppliers of fertilizers and of intermediate
materials for further blending/processing by other companies.20
The top ten pesticide companies in the world are all represented in South Africa, including
the Big Six in global agrichemicals: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred,
20
In 2008, the three companies had a combined 86 per cent share of the market in fertilizers (Grain SA
2011, iv).

Bayer and BASF. Dow Chemicals entry was through the purchase of the South African
Sentrachem in 1997. The ACB report suggests, and illustrates, a recent trend of integration
between pesticide production and distribution (ACB 2009, 535).
Food processing and distribution is also highly concentrated in South Africa.21 A few large
corporations dominate food processing: National Brands, Pioneer Foods, Tiger Brands, and
Nestl SA together account for over 80 per cent of market share of processed food staples.
The share of a handful of supermarkets chains in retail food sales increased from about 55
per cent in the early 2000s to 62 per cent in 2008 and 68 per cent in 2010. The two largest,
Shoprite and Pick n Pay, had a combined share approaching 50 per cent in 2007. This
reflects not only the dominance of the main supermarket chains in metropolitan centres, but
their expansion since 1994 into black urban townships (no go areas during the struggle
against apartheid in the 1980s and the transition of the early 1990s) and rural towns in the
former bantustans. Andries du Toit and David Neves (2007, 24) provide a vivid example of
the latter:
[T]he sudden retail deregulation of the former Transkei in the 1990s saw the local retail
economy rapidly dominated by large national supermarket chains, which swiftly moved
into the small rural service centres such as Mount Frere. While these supermarkets have
succeeded in supplying local areas with cheaper food, they have also been part of a
far-reaching transfiguration of the rural economy. Crucially, they have undermined the
economic base of the network of rural trading stores that in many ways constituted local
hubs in the regions agrarian economy . . . Rural trading stores were where migrant
labours took the join (labour recruitment); stores milled local farmers maize, bought and
sold local agricultural surpluses, and were hubs of postal and telephonic communication
. . . [today] Three national supermarket chains (Shoprite, Spar and Boxer, a subsidiary of
the Pick n Pay group) have shop frontage within a few hundred metres of each other on
the towns main road.
International Trade
Deregulation and liberalization since 1994 have opened South Africa to world market influences in a manner that could hardly have been anticipated a decade earlier (RSA 2010, 34).
One indication is that the value of agricultural exports increased more than five times between
19904 and 20057, with horticulture accounting for 45 per cent of exports: the effect of
the removal of trade sanctions and new investment in export production (RSA 2010, 15, 16).
An index of trade openness, calculated as the value of total exports plus total imports as a
proportion of the value of total agricultural production, doubled from 0.35 in 19904 to 0.73
in 20057 (ibid., table 8). Contained within this measure of openness, and the other side of the
coin of trade liberalization, is that agricultural imports have increased faster than exports, with
Argentina now the main source of food and feed imports, the latter especially for the rapidly
growing poultry industry. In effect, greater openness to foreign trade has reduced import
cover (ratio of exports/imports), which measures the ability of agriculture to pay for its own
imports. Also relevant here is increased imports of farming inputs such as fertilizer materials
(above) and vegetable seeds, which exceeded the value of all seed exports in 2007 (ACB
2009, 41).
21
This paragraph draws on Greenberg (2010b).
32 Henry Bernstein
New Mobilities of Capital
The entry of FDI (foreign direct investment) in South African agriculture since 1994 has been
limited but strategic, as noted above with reference to seed, agrichemical and fertilizer industries. Other significant entrants include the giant agricultural commodities trading firm Cargill
and the notorious dairy company Parmalat (note 13 above), and Walmart is now poised to make
its mark on food retail marketing (see below). An important purpose of such investment by
multinational corporations is to establish a base in South Africa for subsequent expansion in the
continent.
Here, I focus on the export of South African capitals of different kinds since 1994, exploiting
the new opportunities for mobility opened up to them by the end of apartheid. First, there has
been movement by South African commercial farmers since 1994 (and before), as individuals
or in small groups, to establish farms elsewhere in the region (e.g. Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique) and further afield (e.g. Kenya, Nigeria). Some of this was, no doubt, to escape ANC
government (Hall 2011b). Second, and quite different, is the more recent role of Agri SA in
actively pursuing land concessions, and other favourable conditions, for new farming enterprises
in a number of African countries. A notable example is a deal negotiated by Agri SA with the
government of Congo (Brazzaville) to allocate a consortium of South African commercial
farmers an initial area of 200,000 hectares of former state farms, with the option of expanding
to 10 million hectares (Hall 2011b; see also Martiniello 2010).
There may be another push factor in this second and much more significant movement,
which is articulated by Agri SA, namely a squeeze on the profitability of capitalist farming in
South Africa registered in ongoing cost-price inflation of farm inputs, and the effects of some
tax and regulatory measures. The other side of the same coin is that South African commercial
farmers are going elsewhere on the continent . . . to find cheap land, water, labour and more
lenient tax conditions from which to export to whichever markets seem most lucrative (Hall
2011b, 1516), perhaps spurred on by the example, and apparent ease, of contemporary land
grabbing by foreign investors in Africa more generally.
As Hall aptly observes, this is not so much the export of a farming model as that of
contemporary agribusiness and its modes of organizing commodity chains.22 It is not surprising
then also to find that the sugar corporations Illovo and Tongaat-Hulett have rapidly reinvented
themselves as regional businesses, and now operate in six countries each in southern and east
Africa (Hall 2011b, 8), with a particular interest in biofuel feedstocks and production.23 Indeed,
Hall points out that of 16 major land acquisitions by South African companies elsewhere in
Africa, 12 are for agrofuels jatropha for biodiesel, sugarcane for bioethanol, or a combination
of other feedstocks such as maize, soya and palm oil while three are largely for food crop
production and one for carbon sequestration.24 She also notes the interests of South African
companies in engineering and construction, notably PGBI consulting engineers the leading
22
Indeed, South African commercial farmers involved in the Congo and similar deals do not intend to settle on
the land they acquire. Hall (2011b, 15) asks: What exactly then might South African farmers be bringing to the
rest of Africa, if (as in some cases so far) they get the land for free, do not bring capital, and do not manage the
farms? It would be useful to know about the types and extent of involvement in such deals of black commercial
farmers (for an example, see Farmers Weekly, 11 May 2012) and of key (Agri)BEE actors (see below; and for an
example, Hall 2011b, 7). More generally on land grabbing in the Southern African region, the nuanced analysis
by Hall (2011a) rightly emphasizes the role of African governments, some of which have approached Agri SA; and
on the importance of access to water in land grabbing in Africa, see Woodhouse (2012).
23
See also Richardson (2010) on Illovo in Zambia.
24
Perhaps significantly for the interest of South African capital in biofuel production elsewhere in Africa, the
Biofuels Industrial Strategy announced by the South African government in December 2007 excludes the use of
South African maize as a feedstock because of concerns about food supply and prices.

contractor in building sugar mills and ethanol plants in Africa and in financing these big deals.
Three banks support Agri SAs continental expansion Standard, ABSA and Standard Chartered, with Standard Bank at the forefront25 and South African based, or linked, investment
funds are also highly involved in land acquisition by South African capital.
In addition to Halls examples, the seed company Pannar (above) now operates globally,
including in 19 other African countries, the United States, Argentina, China and elsewhere, and
Hygrotech and AFGRI have extended into markets in the Southern African region and
beyond. South African retail and other service conglomerates have also expanded into the
region and further into Africa, sometimes encountering considerable resistance, as in the case of
Shoprite in Zambia (Abrahams 2009).26
The South African government is active in supporting business expansion by South African
capital, including through access to land. In the past few years, it has signed and updated bilateral
investment treaties (BITs) with 13 other African countries; that is, Agreement[s] on Promotion and Reciprocal Protection of Investment (plus related protocols), and many memoranda
of understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Agriculture. In 2010, the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries announced a R6 billion fund to support South African farmers,
half of which would be spent on projects beyond South Africas borders (Hall 2011b, 78).
In short, the end of apartheid has opened up many new opportunities for the export of
South African capital in agriculture and agribusiness, as in other economic sectors, actively
supported by the government through bilateral deals, its participation in regional and continental organizations, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC),27 and in
international organizations such as the World Bank.28 Especially ironic in this process, as Ruth
Hall remarks (2011b, 15), is what has been called the white tribe of Africa predominantly
white (male) Afrikaner farmers . . . who see the expressed demand for their skills as affirming
their African-ness and their place and role in the future of Africa as a whole.
So far, change since 1994 has been traced through the operations of capital in farming and
agribusiness, within and without South Africas boundaries.This section concludes by sketching
two kinds of change with more immediate effects for South Africas classes of labour: trends in
farm employment and food prices.
Farm Residence and Employment
The modern history of South Africa is one of dispossession over more than three centuries of
colonialism and the trajectories of racialized capitalist development. Moreover, in the past 50
years dispossession has intensified and its patterns and determinants shifted, not least in relation
to the labour demands of commercial farming.29
25
Standard Bank recently acquired 90 per cent of Uganda Commercial Bank, while in 2007 the Industrial and
Commercial Bank of China paid US$5.5 billion for a 20 per cent stake in Standard Bank, which in 2009 then
secured a club loan from five Chinese banks for US$1 billion (Hall 2011b, 13).
26
See also on Shoprite in Zambia, Miller (2008); and on South African investment in the region, Miller et al.
(2008), and in Africa more generally, Southall (2008).
27
In Zambia, the presence of South African supermarket management at SADC trade negotiations often
outweighs that of Zambias foreign trade contingent (Abrahams 2009, 132).
28
Relations between South African capital and the post-apartheid state, and especially their effects for the rest
of Africa, have revived debate of South African sub-imperialism in the continent, reviewed by Samson (2009).
29
Here, I deal only with farm employment. A recent report by the business-oriented consultancy Bureau for
Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP 2011) recommends boosting agricultural employment by extending cultivated
area, especially under irrigation, and substituting for major food and feed imports where feasible. Its projections
include downstream employment effects in processing and export, as well as production, of horticultural commodities in particular.
34 Henry Bernstein
In the six volumes of a notable work of oppositional social science, the Surplus Peoples
Project (SPP) documented the removals of black South Africa between 1960 and 1983, and
concluded that some 3.5 million were forcibly relocated to the bantustans in that period, 1.1
million of them from their homes on white farms (Platzky and Walker 1985). A subsequent, less
exhaustive, study covering the next 20-year period (19842004), estimated removals of some
4.2 million black Africans, of whom some 1.7 million a deliberately conservative estimate
were evicted from farms (Wegerif et al. 2005). The data for 19842004 suggest a fairly
consistent pattern of year-on-year evictions before and after the end of apartheid, albeit with
more evictions between 1994 and 2004 and with peaks in 1984, after severe drought; in 1992,
again in the wake of massive drought and as white farmers anticipated the advent of an ANC
government; in 1997, when the government passed the Extension of Security of Tenure Act
(ESTA); and in 2003, when a minimum wage for farm workers was introduced (and raised in
subsequent years).
In the 10 years from 1995 to 2004, over 2 million black people left white farms where they
lived, of whom about 930,000 were evicted.The principal reason for evictions was loss of farm
employment (almost 70 per cent of cases). Few evictions follow due process now provided by
law, and ESTA both as statute and in practice provides inadequate safeguards for often
long-established farm workers and other residents.30
While official employment data have to be treated with considerable caution,31 they suggest
that total farm employment went down from about 1.2 million in 1990 to 940,000 in 2002,
when it also registered a notable shift towards casual employment at 49 per cent of the total,
in which anticipation of the introduction of the minimum wage in agriculture (from 2003) was
perhaps a factor (Wegerif et al. 2005, 33).32 Employment declined by 15 per cent from 1994 to
2002, and the decline accelerated from 2002 to 2006. In all, 40 per cent of farm workers lost
their jobs between 1993 and 2006, when there were less than 628,200 enumerated agricultural
workers (RSA 2010, 20): Although hard data do not exist, anecdotal evidence from all
provinces suggests that evictions from farms substantially contributed to the growth of dense
rural informal settlements, as well as to the growth of peri-urban informal settlements in both
urban centres and in the platteland (ibid., 21)33
Farm wages seem to have increased steadily, if also patchily, in recent years, albeit with some,
again familiar, qualifications.34 For example, growing money wages often replace previous
payments in kind; lower-paid workers tend to be more vulnerable to sacking and eviction
30
Of 24,400 claims for security of tenure lodged by March 2001, only 175 had been settled by July 2005
(Wegerif et al. 2005, 47). See further Hall et al. in this special issue.
31
One problem, not unique to South Africa but very marked there, is the numbers of undocumented farm
workers, especially those who are illegal immigrants for example, Zimbabweans working on farms in the border
zones of the north (Rutherford and Addison 2007) to the Western Cape (Theron 2010); the women who
commute daily from Leostho to horticultural enterprises in the eastern Free State (Johnston 2007); and many
migrant agricultural workers from Mozambique. Another problem, albeit perhaps less significant than in the past,
is unrecorded labour by members of farm worker households.
32
According to Bhorat et al. (2012), farm worker wages rose by 17 per cent between 2003 and 2007, and
contributed to declining employment in agriculture, even though about 60 per cent of farm workers received less
than the minimum wage in 2007; see also note 42 below.
33
Platteland refers to the countryside, a term whose meaning has expanded to encompass all areas outside the big
urban centres. See also Wegerif et al. (2005, chs 6 and 7), whose data suggest that most evictees are no worse off,
materially and socially, than when they lived and worked on farms. On one hand, opportunities to keep livestock
and cultivate crops are generally significantly reduced. On the other hand, social grants are now more important
to the incomes of many evicted households, which also enjoy improved access to certain infrastructure and services
than they had on farms.
34
National statistics on farm wages are very weak.They are gathered too seldom, are not disaggregated enough,
and rely on voluntary returns for their information (Greenberg 2010a, 16).

following the introduction of the minimum wage; and the minimum wage stimulates further
casualization, which has strongly gendered features (as do wage levels). Nonetheless, and as
indicated above, it seems that the desire for cheaper farm labour is one factor in the drive by
South African capital to acquire land and establish production in other African countries.
Food Prices
Volatile and high prices of staple foods in conditions of widespread unemployment and poverty
are always likely to contribute to popular political action, and they did in South Africa during
the struggle against apartheid (Marx 1992, 245) and the transition of 19904. Indeed, another
report of the late apartheid state investigated the price mechanism in the food chain (RSA
1992a), although its findings, critical of the role of supermarkets, had no impact, unlike the same
years report on the state marketing boards (above).35
Consumer price controls for bread, maize meal and dairy products were also abolished
during the transition, in 1991. In the 1990s, food-price inflation kept pace with overall inflation
levels until 2001 (RSA 2010, 39). In 20012, there was a sharp increase in staple food prices,
which have been volatile since then, with spikes in 2008 and again most recently in 201112.
Conventional accounts of the inflation in 2002 attributed this to the combined depreciation of
the rand and rising commodity prices in international markets (hence signalling import
dependence, indicated above). This type of explanation was endorsed by the Food Price
Monitoring Committee, established as part of the National Agricultural Marketing Council
(NAMC) by the government in 1997 to monitor and investigate food prices: in order to allay
suspicions that industry role players were unfairly increasing the prices of basic foods as the
Presidency Review put it, with perhaps unintended honesty (RSA 2010, 39).
Not all suspicions were allayed, neither on the part of producers organizations such as Grain
SA (2011) concerned with rising input costs, nor on that of some applied and academic
economists and other commentators, let alone those on whom price rises of staple foods impact
most:
South Africa faces a structural household food insecurity problem, the prime causes of
which are widespread chronic poverty and unemployment. Rising food prices, particularly of maize and wheat which are the staple diet of the poor in South Africa, pose
serious problems for the urban and rural poor as most are net buyers of food. Recent
information . . . suggest(s) that (international) food prices will increase steadily over the
next decade even if there are some fluctuations and the occasional drop in prices . . .
Given increasingly strong linkages between the local level and national and international
commodity chains and economic networks, even remote rural households in South Africa
are affected by changes in these networks . . . Most severely affected will be the urban and
rural poor, the landless and female-headed households. (Altman et al. 2009, 3478)36
Of course, international price movements have important effects, including their contributions
to price asymmetry, in this case when local prices respond differently to upward movements
35
The argument of buyer-drivenness, to use the term of commodity/value chain analysis, is often advanced, of
course, as much or more in the interests of producers, in this case South Africas (white) commercial farmers, than
of consumers. Indeed, the 1992 investigation of the price mechanism in the food chain may well have been, in
part, a sop to commercial farmers to balance the far more significant report advocating the repeal of the
Marketing Act and the subsidies made available through its provisions.
36
Du Toit and Neves (2007, 24), cited above, noted that supermarkets have succeeded in supplying local [rural]
areas with cheaper food than was previously available, which is not to say that their food prices do not increase.
36 Henry Bernstein
in international prices than to downward movements typically more rapidly and more slowly,
respectively. In a careful analysis of the inflation of 2002, Chabane (2004) was one of the first
to point to the effects of concentration and market power for consumer prices, and Traub and
Meyer (2008, 224) found that
real maize milling/retailing margins in South Africa have increased by at least 20% since
the deregulation of retail prices in 1991. Moreover, there is evidence of trend growth in
the size of the milling margin over time. Simulations indicate that the deregulation of
maize meal prices has entailed a transfer of at least US$179 million/year from consumers
to agents in the marketing system.37
TRANSFORMATION(S)?
Transformation was the clarion call of the transition of 19904, on the lips of all those who
hoped, or claimed to hope, that historic change was on the agenda to overcome the inheritance
of South Africas racialized capitalism and its massive inequalities.38 Today, the term transformation is heard less. In this section, I assess selected changes in agriculture since 1994 along a
spectrum of transformation(s), referring to changes of more and less profound impact on the
social relations of production and reproduction. My criterion, in line with the purposes of this
special issue, is the effects for the social reproduction of South Africas classes of labour rather
than standard notions of the performance of the agricultural sector (growth and dynamism,
efficiency and competitiveness etc.); that is, from the viewpoint of capital, which informs the
discourses of most government reports, producer organizations, the farming and business press,
and conventional economic analysis. By classes of labour I mean the growing numbers . . .
who now depend directly and indirectly on the sale of their labour power for their own daily
reproduction (Panitch and Leys, 2001, ix, emphasis added). Indirectly is important here, as it
suggests a more expansive notion than inherited concepts of proletarianization and the like, to
encompass the various components of the so-called informal working class and the reserve
army of labour (Bernstein 2009), including the vast numbers of small/marginal/poor farmers
in the South (Bernstein 2010; Lerche 2010).39
Farm Labour
Given the histories of farm labour regimes during (and before) apartheid, and the difficulties of
organizing farm workers, especially in the conditions that prevailed in South Africa, legislation
since 1994 concerning security of tenure for black residents on white farms (ESTA), and
minimum wage levels appears as a significant transformation, or potentially so. As noted
above, however, this has to be qualified by the steady, or dramatic, decline in numbers of
permanent farm workers, albeit that some the most skilled have improved conditions of
37
I had suggested (Bernstein 1996b, 141) that the ostensibly historic deregulation of the maize industry would
be completed when potent corporate interests had secured the conditions of their (private) regulation of the
market. The studies cited seem to support that prediction.
38
The most informative and incisive single-volume account of socio-economic and political change since 1994
is by Marais (2011), although he says almost nothing about agriculture.
39
It is also more easily, and usefully, disassociated from potent images (memories?) of the proletariat as the
classic industrial working class; on the formation and dynamics of classes of labour in other guises than the latter,
see the illuminating studies and arguments of van der Linden (2008) and Banaji (2010). On discourses of wage
employment in South African policies, politics and ideologies, before and since the end of apartheid, see
the provocative study by Barchiesi (2011).

employment and higher wages.40 Wegerif et al. (2005, 47) observed that while ESTA and other
laws introduced since 1994 have done little to prevent evictions, they are also not a significant
cause. More significant causes are the normal tendencies of capitalist farming, accelerated since
1994, and including further mechanization and other labour-saving innovation, and the segmentation of farm labour, depending on branch, into a shrinking permanently employed core
and larger numbers of casualized, often immigrant, workers often, and perhaps increasingly,
recruited through labour brokers (Greenberg 2010a, 17).41
It is impossible to gauge the effect for commercial farm employment had the government
expanded incentives to encourage all farmers to begin to invest in a wage labour intensive,
technologically dynamic and internationally competitive farm production structure, as recommended by MERG (1993, 194), cited earlier.What ANC governments have done is to support,
and even to incentivize, the export of South African capital to establish farm enterprises
elsewhere in Africa, one attraction of which is the prospect of cheaper labour and no doubt
more compliant labour too (above).42
Regulating Agribusiness
The Competition Act of 1998, which replaced earlier apartheid-era legislation, established three
bodies the Competition Commission, Tribunal and Appeal Court with several objectives.
The first is to promote the efficiency, adaptability and development of the economy while
several others bear the stamp of transformation discourse, notably the final objective: to
promote a greater spread of ownership, in particular to increase the ownership stakes of
historically disadvantaged persons.43
Greenberg (2010b, 19) considers that The Competition Commission has played a very
important role in raising awareness of the governance and functioning of agro-food supply
chains . . . The Competition Commission has some teeth . . . Competition policy does constrain some private sector efforts at self-interested chain governance. The work of the Commission, together with that of the associated Tribunal and Appeal Court, thus appears as an
40
Wegerif et al. (2005, 16, 33, 89) indicate cases of more positive management practices concerning farm
workers; in the 1980s some larger and commercially successful farmers started to improve workers housing, to
establish schools for workers children, and so on, in anticipation of the end of apartheid (see also note 41).
41
Western Cape fruit and wine farms provide an apposite case for considering changes in employment patterns
and practices, not least because of their centrality to the two reform scenarios outlined at the beginning of this
paper. The first of the Liptons two-volume study of Land, Labour and Livelihoods in Rural South Africa was devoted
entirely to the Western Cape (Lipton et al. 1996), and Western Cape horticulture exemplifies the kind of wage
labour intensive, technologically dynamic and internationally competitive farm production structure favoured by
MERG (1993). Ewert and Hamman (1996) suggested that labour regimes on Western Cape fruit and wine farms
started to change from the late 1970s towards more modernized forms of exploitation: neo-paternalism, formal
collective bargaining, and corporatist equity-sharing and decision making, in response to increased export
opportunities (especially with the end of trade sanctions from 1990) combined with growing assertiveness by farm
workers.They argued that the emergent modern labour regime built on the historic division of labour (and social
tensions) between Coloured farm workers and African migrants from the Eastern Cape permanent and casual
labour to generate a new version of ethnic corporatism. Subsequent research by du Toit and Ally (2003)
highlighted the growing importance of labour broking/contracting in conjunction with increasing casualization,
also illustrated by Theron (2010). For incisive analysis of the contradictions, and limits, of labour reform in the
Western Cape wine industry since 1994 through social technologies of private regulation, see du Toit (2002), and
in the context of BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) restructuring, du Toit et al. (2008).
42
The London Guardian of 5 March 2012 reported a long-running and violent labour conflict on the 1,800
hectare Magwa farm in the Eastern Cape, said to be the largest tea plantation in the southern hemisphere: The
farm claimed its workers were the best paid in the industry, earning five times more than their counterparts in
Malawi.The latter may well be accurate, even though some Magwa workers were paid less than the South African
national minimum wage for farms, of R1,376 a month in 2012.
43
See http://www.compcom.co.za/ (accessed 9 February 2012).
38 Henry Bernstein
Table 4. Selected Competition Commission investigations of agribusiness
Activity/commodity Companies investigated
Reason
Date of decision
Decision
Fertilizers
Sasol, Omnia, Yara
Cartel conduct in
the supply of
nitrogenous fertiliser
May 2009
Sasol fined R250

million
Bakeries (bread)
Tiger, Premier,
Foodcorp,
Pioneer
Cartel conduct,
price fixing
November
2007
Tiger fined R98

million
February
2010
Pioneer fined
R175 million
Grain milling,
bread, poultry
and eggs
Pioneer
Several cases of
anti-competitive
behaviour
November
2010
Pioneer to pay
additional R500
milliona
Milk
Clover, Nestl,
Parmalat and others
Price fixing and

other practices
April 2011
Case withdrawnb
Grain storage
AFGRI and others
Fixing storage tariffs
June 2011
Settlement reachedc
Seeds
Pioneer Hi-Bred
(Dow Chemicals)
and Pannar
Anti-competitive
effects of
proposed merger
December
2010
Merger refused
Retail
distribution
Walmart and
Massmart
Anti-competitive
effects of purchase of
majority stake in
Massmart by Walmart
March 2012
Walmart takeover
approved
Source: Searches on Competition Commission website at http://www.compcom.co.za/, (accessed 9

February 2012).44
a
R250 million as an administrative penalty, and R250 million to create an Agro-processing
Competitiveness Fund, to be administered by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
b
Following a ruling by the Supreme Court of Appeal.
c
With administrative penalties.
important transformation in the regulation of agribusiness. Examples of its cases in Table 4

feature many of the companies mentioned in the earlier section on Agribusiness.
The record of Competition Commission investigations, and Tribunal and Appeal Court
decisions, can be impressive, as Greenberg suggests for example, rejection of the proposed
merger of Pioneer Hi-Bred (Dow Chemicals) and Pannar.45 However, he notes that there are
also ambiguities and limits: collusion and market dominance have to be very blatant before the
44
For Walmart, see http://www.polity.org.za/article/walmart-in-south-africa-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly2011-10-20 and http://news.yahoo.com/wal-mart-gets-ahead-south-africa-083731887.html (accessed 31 March
2012). In May 2011,Walmart paid R17 billion (US$2.4 billion) for 51 per cent of Massmart, one of South Africas
big food retailers with 265 stores in the country.This was among Walmarts largest overseas investments and its first
in Africa. Interestingly, the case was brought to the Competition Commission by three government Departments
(Agriculture, Economic Development, and Trade and Industry) and the South African Commercial, Catering and
Allied Workers Union (Saccawu). The settlement called for the reinstatement of 503 workers sacked by Massmart
to make itself more attractive to Walmart, according to Saccawu.
45
This decision was later overturned by the Competition Appeal Court in May 2012 (Business Day, 28 May
2012).

Commission can take action (Greenberg 2010a, 24). I would add that legal and other technical
complexities can make investigations and hearings very protracted, and the Commission has no
capacity to intervene directly in, say, food prices, which are of great social and political concern,
as it is well aware. Indeed, one typical route to the Commission is through claims of
anti-competitive practices brought by smaller firms against agricultural input and food corporations; that is, regulation of relations between capitals. Proactive transformative actions on
behalf of consumers, a largely unorganized constituency, especially poor (black) consumers of
food staples, are largely beyond the Commissions reach, as are actions to achieve a greater
spread of ownership, in particular to increase the ownership stakes of historically disadvantaged
persons (the Commissions fifth objective, cited above).
Land Reform, Black Farming and AgriBEE

That last objective (or aspiration) informed the hopes that many invested in land reform after
1994. In their view, this was potentially the largest single transformation in the countryside,
especially when combined with the belief that a greater spread of ownership of agricultural
land was a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of improved livelihoods based in farming for
many of the rural dispossessed. In effect, this would generate the most fundamental, and
democratic, change in South Africas agrarian structure.
An assessment of black farming and land reform is beyond the scope of this paper. One can
observe, at least, that land reform has delivered very little relative to the sheer amount of
political rhetoric, sympathetic analysis by its advocates, policy declarations and shifts, and
government programmes, initiatives and spending, devoted to it.46 This applies to both the
amount of land redistributed and frustration with the effects of most land reform projects.47
Moreover, land reform policies from the beginning have been permeated by profound tensions
between land redistribution as redress of historic dispossession and as a condition of economic
and social development (for a nuanced analysis, see Walker 2008), and within the latter between
promoting black commercial farming (on different scales) the source of the notion of
emergent farmers and resolving the crisis of social reproduction of the rural dispossessed:
land reform as poverty alleviation (see, inter alios, Aliber et al. 2009).
How has the high profile of land redistribution as a stated government objective, and such
measures of land reform as have occurred, affected the perceptions and practices of commercial
agriculture (agrarian capital) and agribusiness (corporate capital)? The answer seems to be very
little, with exceptions subject to specific local circumstances. Certainly commercial farmers
organizations use the threat of land reform in their rhetoric (for examples, see Hall 2011b),
often with reference to the disaster of neighbouring Zimbabwe, but this is part of their
standard ideological noise.The outward expansion of South African agrarian capital, or its most
46
Much of it detailed in Greenberg (2010a), whose systematic status report usefully locates land reform in a wider
political economy of South African agriculture, including its environmental dimensions not dealt with in this paper.
47 The Presidency Review notes that After almost 14 years of state sponsored land reform, slightly more than 4
million ha of the available agricultural land in South Africa has been transferred through the formal programme.
Furthermore government recently admitted that the failure rate of new land reform projects could be as high as
50% (RSA 2010, 41). It further suggests that private transfers, some funded by mortgages from the Land Bank or
the commercial banks, have occurred at a higher rate than have state transfers (ibid., 42), and that Production
conditions in the communal farming areas have remained largely unchanged or may even have worsened, and
tenure forms have hardly changed in the communal areas, despite attempts to provide greater tenure security (ibid.).
How necessary the latter is to production growth in the former homelands is explored and questioned in the case
studies in Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 2). See further the overview of black farming by Cousins in this special issue.
40 Henry Bernstein
Table 5. A typology of black farmers
Production unit
Turnover
Ownership and management
Number
Commercial in
communal areas
>R300,000
Communal ownership
Development projects
Private ownership
Emerging commercial
in communal areas
<R300,000
>20 hectares
Communal ownership
Small farmers in development projects
Private ownership
35,000
<20 hectares
Communal ownership
Private ownership
Little formal market participation
1.246 million
Subsistence in
communal areas
Allotments
Market gardens
Source: Derived from Vink and Van Rooyen (2009, 35).
strategic elements, is driven much more by other factors and purposes than by fears of any
prospective radical land reform in South Africa and is supported by the government (above).
Also, some commercial farmers and farmers and agribusiness organizations initiated their own
(localized) transformation projects, typically as a gesture towards rainbow nationhood the
new inclusiveness but not in ways that threaten existing (and expanding) configurations of
power in relations of property, production and markets.
As indicated earlier, there are no systematic or adequate data on the numbers and types of
black farmers who they are, what they do and where they are to assess transformation(s)
since 1994. The Presidency Review notes that data on the small-scale farming sector are not
readily available. The last survey that directly focused on this group of farmers was a one-off
survey conducted by the Department of Agriculture and StatsSA in 1999 (RSA 2010, 21),
apparently also used by Vink and Van Rooyen (2009). Table 5, derived from their paper,
illustrates the problem.
First, the figure for subsistence farmers is most likely a significant underestimation. In the
most comprehensive study to date of smallholder (black) farming in South Africa, Aliber et al.
(2009, vol. 1, 4) use annual Labour Force Survey (LFS) data for 2007, to give a figure of 4
million farmers in 2 million households in communal areas, of whom 92 per cent farm for
subsistence; that is, for a main or extra source of food.48
Second,Vink and Van Rooyen give no data for numbers (nor farm sizes) of black commercial
farmers in communal areas and the figure of 35,000 emerging commercial farmers is purely
imaginary (Ben Cousins, pers. comm.).Again, by contrast,Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 1) suggest about
320,000 commercially oriented small holders who farm for a main or extra source of
[monetary] income.49 Moreover, it is difficult to distinguish in any useful socio-economic sense
between the first and second categories in Table 5 fromVink andVan Rooyens text (2009, 334).
Third,Vink and Van Rooyens typology considers only black farmers on land in communal
areas, and hence omits those, albeit few, who have acquired land in formerly white areas
48
They also use the LFS data to provide a broad profile of black smallholders by gender, age and geographical
distribution.
49
Greenberg (2010a, xi) gives an estimated 240,000 black farmers with a commercial focus.

through purchase or rental in the regular land market,50 and/or have established (or expanded)
commodity enterprises on formerly white land acquired through restitution and other redistributive measures.51
The three types of black farmers in Table 5 correspond approximately to the first three
categories of land reform beneficiaries identified by the governments Comprehensive Rural
Development Programme (CRDP), its latest initiative launched in 2009, namely commercial
smallholders wanting land to expand; commercial-ready subsistence producers wanting to
expand part-time farming; and landless households seeking small pieces of land for subsistence
production (Greenberg 2010a, 13). The kinds of obstacles presented by existing structures
and dynamics of commercial agriculture (including their spatial economy) to advance by black
commercial smallholders and commercial-ready subsistence producers are illustrated in the 16
case studies collected in Aliber et al. (2009, vol. 2).
But the CRDP has two further categories of actual or potential beneficiaries who point
towards more substantial acquisitions of currently white-owned land; namely, well-established
black commercial farmers with the potential to become large-scale farmers, and financially
capable aspirant black commercial farmers that is, black businesspeople wanting to invest in
agriculture (ibid.). Presumably it was these two categories that the deputy president of Agri SA
had in mind when he stated, in November 2010, the organizations support for black South
Africans purchases of land for farming, and gave a figure of some 700 black emerging
commercial farmers around the country.52
Of more recent provenance than the transformation banner of land reform is that of
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), constitutionally established in the Broad Based Black
Economic Empowerment Act of 2003. Codes of Good Practice were established from 2007,
requiring all state bodies and public companies to apply them in decisions concerning procurement; licensing and concessions; publicprivate partnerships; and sales of state-owned
assets or businesses. The BEE Sector Charter for Agriculture, AgriBEE, was gazetted in
2008.53
In one sense, the provisions of AgriBEE are broader than those of the land reform agenda,
in that they encourage black ownership and management of a variety of enterprises and
activities in agricultural commodity chains. For example, in April 2011 Standard Bank
announced new opportunities for a ring-fenced credit line . . . to make finance accessible to
the right entrepreneurs. We are hoping to provide banking services and financing to more black
farmers or black consortiums buying stakes in existing entities (emphases added).54
50
The case of Pitso Sekhoto, owner of Makolobane Farmers Enterprise in the Senekal area in the Free State?
His farm supplies milk to Woolworths retail stores nationally and apples to fresh produce markets in Pretoria,
Bloemfontein, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg. It employs 34 farm workers and 66 additional seasonal workers
for the apple harvest from January to March. During a visit to Senekal (in early 2011?) the Agriculture Minister
Tina Joemat-Pettersson emphasized that the establishment of successful black commercial farmers is
key to land reform in South Africa. See http://www.southafrica.info/news/business/442005.htm (accessed 18
November 2011).
51
For example, Gift Mafuleka who has a 5-year lease on a portion of Leeuwfontein farm, where he was
previously a crop manager, near Bronkhorstspruit on the border of Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces. His
enterprise is supported by the food multinational corporation McCain, to which Mafuleka delivers peas and sweet
corn to pay for irrigation equipment supplied by McCain. See http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/
newbusiness/mphiwesiyalima-201010.htm#ixzz1sZ5grL22 (accessed 18 November 2011).
52
See http://www.sagoodnews.co.za/agriculture_land_reform/agri_sa_backs_black_farmers.html (accessed 9
February 2011).
53
Overviews of its provisions are given in RSA (2010, 567) and Greenberg (2010a, 3740).
54
See
http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/empowerment/agribee-290411.htm#ixzz1sZ56Vuy4
(accessed 18 November 2011).
42 Henry Bernstein
Notable examples of BEE business transactions, some predating AgriBEE, include
(Greenberg 2010a, 378):
purchase of Boschendal wine estate, for R323 million;
acquisition of a 25.1 per cent stake in KWV by Phetego Investments;55
acquisition of a 15 per cent stake in Distells South African Distilleries and Wines by a BEE
consortium;
acquisition of a 26.77 per cent stake in AFGRI Operations by the Agri Sizwe Empowerment Trust, for R502 million;
acquisition of a 4 per cent stake in Country Foods by the Kagiso Trust, for R5.5 million; and
acquisition of a 30 per cent stake in exporter Afrifresh Group by Vuwa Investments.
The first three deals were in the Western Cape wine industry, and among an earlier wave of
acquisitions by BEE investment companies that sprang up after 1994, typically closely linked
with senior ANC politicians, their relatives and other associates (see, inter alios, Freund 2007;
Southall 2007; Marais 2011).They were also a result of politically extremely complicated, murky
and compromised processes of restructuring/reform of the wine industry (Williams 2005; du
Toit et al. 2008).56 The other cases listed also follow the BEE pattern established earlier of share
acquisitions, in this context in existing agricultural and food companies.Whether AgriBEE will
succeed in transforming the prospects of significant numbers of the dispossessed, classes of
labour in the countryside remains to be seen. but the experiences of land reform to date do not
support any realistic expectations of progress.
CONCLUSION
The survey in this paper shows a process of normalization of capitalist agriculture (farming and
agribusiness) in South Africa since 1994, albeit in abnormal historical circumstances. The end
of apartheid, one can observe, was both historic and much compromised. It strikes me even
more forcefully now than it did during the years of the transition, when I spent considerable
time in the country, how effectively South African agrarian and agribusiness capital with the
support of the last apartheid government (re-)positioned itself for the new dispensation, and
on many fronts: economic and legal, political and ideological. This is not to say that there was
a single encompassing master plan (or conspiracy) of organized agriculture, but there was a
series of connecting plots by groups with more knowledge of how agriculture works and
greater coherent purpose than the ANC was able to mobilize, and which laid the ground for
subsequent normalization qua deregulation/liberalization.57
55
KWV is Kooperatiewe WijnmakersVereniging, the historically dominant organization in the wine industry.
For a detailed analysis of the KWVPhetego deal, see Williams (2005), and further on this, as well as Boschendal
the first corporate BEE deal in the wine industry in 2003 and the Distell case, du Toit et al. (2008,
1821).
56
Du Toit et al. (2008, 28) conclude that The South African wine industry, by casting Black Economic
Empowerment as a managerial exercise through the Wine BEE Charter and its codes, and by reducing
transformation to a marketing exercise . . . has been able to avoid facing potentially more uncomfortable
outcomes of transformation such as land redistribution, import boycotts and much improved working conditions
for grape pickers that would go much further to redress persistent racialized inequalities.
57
Plots in the sense deployed in Leys and Players compelling study (2011) of the politics of privatization of the
National Health Service in England; that is, dense networks and practices of covert collusion between corporate
interests and government. That strategic stances and key decisions concerning organized agriculture during the
transition in South Africa laid the basis for much of what happened after 1994 is also due to weaknesses of the
ANC, indicated in the next paragraph.

What explains the largely ineffectual positions on land and agrarian questions of the ANC
going into the political transition and emerging from it as the party of government since 1994?
I would suggest (drawing on Bernstein 1996a) the following conjunctural elements and sources
of tension and ambiguity, in addition to those noted earlier. First, the 1940s to early 1960s
was the last period of widespread and overt struggles in the countryside. The resurgence
of resistance to apartheid from the early 1970s was mostly urban in character, vision and
organization. Second, the collapse of Soviet state socialism without which the end of
apartheid might have been further delayed? was a moment of profound demoralization and
improvised revision of its positions by the South African Communist Party (SACP). Third,
SACP cadres who were trained in agriculture had been so in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, with a strong belief in the technical superiority of large-scale farming. At the same
time, those cadres who were based in Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Zambia had observed
for themselves the crises of the various socialisms of those countries, both scientific and
African, including the poor performance of their state farms. This left organized agriculture
in South Africa as the exemplar of modern farming, able to provide national food security,
which, together with food prices, was a major concern of the trade union federation COSATU
(the third member of the Alliance with the ANC and SACP). Finally, and without recourse to
crude theses of a (black) bourgeoisie-in-formation, the circumstances of the transition and the
course of its negotiations enlarged the political space and influence of aspirant petty-bourgeois
and bourgeois elements of the heterogeneous class alliance of the national liberation movement.
For ANC governments since 1994, constructions of scientific farming continued to exert their
ideological power, and concerns with food prices, and food security, persisted, within the
general tendency to conservative economic strategy and its pressures on sometimes progressive
policies of social provision.
Does all this vindicate then the well-known liberal position that apartheid was irrational
for capitalism? Its thrust was that the racial order distorted factor markets, not least for
labour, and distorted income distribution, thereby suppressing effective demand (growth of
the domestic market). For this perspective, the principal transformations in agriculture since
1994 are registered through the competition and growth-enhancing effects of twin-track
deregulation of the domestic market and liberalization of international trade and investment.
This paper has suggested, rather, that it has been the removal of restrictions on the mobility
of capital and commodities imposed on South Africa in the apartheid era that has contributed
to greater concentration in farming and agribusiness, with new opportunities for trade, and
for inward and outward investment. That, together with agricultural and economic policy
more generally since 1994, has done little to transform the circumstances of South Africas
dispossessed majority, who remain enmeshed in the inheritances of racialized inequality
(Marais 2011).
Whether wholesale redistributive land reform is a solution, or part of the solution, to the
crisis of social reproduction in, and beyond, the countryside, is outside the scope of this essay
and is addressed by other contributions to this special issue (Aliber and Cousins, Cousins, du
Toit, Ferguson). On one hand, it is evident that the forms of further capitalist development of
agriculture since 1994 reinforce the obstacles to the viable growth of production by small-scale
farmers their prospects of accumulation from below (Cousins in this special issue). On the
other hand, I would suggest that any notable progress in advancing the material well-being and
security of South Africas classes of labour, rural and urban, requires a radical political and
macroeconomic project centred on public investment and redistribution.The land and agrarian
questions may be only a modest part of that project, despite their weight in the historical
making of capitalism in South Africa and the region.
44 Henry Bernstein
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Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 13 No. 1, January 2013, pp. 2346.

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 25

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 27

Gross farm income

Source: Vink and van Rooyen (2009, 32).10

Presidency Review notes a variety of diversification strategies by commercial farmers in terms

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 29

Market share (percentage)

Top three: Epol, Meadow

75 (of poultry feeds)

Top two: Rainbow Chicken,

Top four: AFGRI, Tydstroom

Baking, maize meal,

Source: Derived from Chabane et al. (2008).

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Source: Adapted from ACB (2009, 567).

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 31

This paragraph draws on Greenberg (2010b).

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 33

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 35

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 37

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sasol, Omnia, Yara

Sasol fined R250

Tiger fined R98

Price fixing and

AFGRI and others

Fixing storage tariffs

Source: Searches on Competition Commission website at http://www.compcom.co.za/, (accessed 9

important transformation in the regulation of agribusiness. Examples of its cases in Table 4

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 39

Land Reform, Black Farming and AgriBEE

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Ownership and management

Source: Derived from Vink and Van Rooyen (2009, 35).

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 41

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 43

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994 45

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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