Dis/Articulations and the Hydrosocial Cycle: Postapartheid Geographies of Agrarian Change in the Ceres Valley, South Africa

Abstract

This paper analyzes the role of the hydrosocial cycle in producing and sustaining uneven geographies of capitalist agriculture in the Ceres Valley, a major center of South Africa's high-value deciduous fruit industry I explore ways in which the mobilization, appropriation, and transformation of water resources become intertwined with and reinforce the radicalized capitalist relations that have characterized the local political economy of export fruit production since the 19th century These relations have solidified over time as they have been able to adapt to shifting political–economic and political–ecological dynamics. Focusing on the postapartheid period, I examine how white agrarian capital has been able to maintain and even strengthen its dominance over the regional economy despite the dramatic shuffling of political and economic priorities. I pay particular attention to how the fatal combination of the liberalization of agricultural markets and the financialization of water supply becomes articulated through interconnected sociospatial processes of dispossession, devaluation, and disinvestment. I argue that questions of access to and control over the hydrosocial cycle not only reveal how marginalized and radicalized social actors—farm workers, small-scale farmers, township residents—become differentially articulated with and disarticulated from existing and emerging circuits of capital accumulation. It also opens promising analytical and political avenues through which to illuminate and confront uneven geographies of capitalist development in ways that highlight the linked sociospatial processes of production and social reproduction.