Land Reform and Sugarcane Farming in the Mpumalanga Lowveld

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways in which the Mpumalanga sugar industry has been transformed by land reform processes and discusses the impact that these processes have had on land reform beneficiaries and on the industry more broadly. Having emerged from apartheid under a dualistic agrarian structure, the sugar industry appears to have embraced land reform to the extent that it is considered a rare example of success against a backdrop of national underachievement. By 2013, 62 percent of all land used to grow sugarcane in Mpumalanga was owned by black South Africans. Land reform has occurred in two forms: land restitution in which people have been able to claim land from which they were historically dispossessed, and market-led land redistribution conducted on a willing buyer willing seller basis. Of these, land restitution is by far the most significant in terms of area transferred. The Greater Tenbosch Land Claim, a consolidated restitution claim by seven “community trusts” or community property associations is one of the most valuable claims to have been settled in South Africa, amounting to 61,000 hectares. This paper reports on a three-year empirical study undertaken from 2012 to 2014 in Nkomazi District, Mpumalanga. It draws on the findings of interviews with a number of key informants and a questionnaire survey of small-scale sugar growers. It also makes use of secondary sources, including those in the academic literature, and statistical data provided by the sugar industry in Nkomazi. The paper discusses the outcomes of land restitution with a focus on three land use arrangements on restituted sugar farms: joint ventures, land leases and direct management operations. It also reports on the outcomes of market-led land redistribution in the Nkomazi sugar-growing area. The paper argues that land reform has so far served more to consolidate farming operations and sugar cane supply for the sugar milling company than to deliver benefits for new land-owning communities.