Issues surrounding labour tenancy in South Africa are controversial and complex. The issue is controversial in that that it currently reflects a struggle over access to land and tenure security that spans more than a century. The controversy surrounding labour tenancy derives from the fact that the role players within this scenario often hold widely differentiated perceptions about each other’s rights, duties and respective power relationships.

Issues surrounding labour tenancy in South Africa are controversial and complex. The issue is controversial in that that it currently reflects a struggle over access to land and tenure security that spans more than a century. The controversy surrounding labour tenancy derives from the fact that the role players within this scenario often hold widely differentiated perceptions about each other’s rights, duties and respective power relationships.

Various multilateral organisations, for instance the World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organisation have been at the forefront of the different programmes designed to enhance tenure security of landholders as the basis for long-term agricultural development. This has been the case especially in parts of the world where customary systems of tenure are predominant. Wily argues that ‘so little of sub-Saharan Africa is subject to formal entitlements as legally recognised private properties’.

This review critically examines the evolution of laws, policies and practices across colonial, apartheid and contemporary eras to identify the associated processes and patterns of uneven development and their contribution to the structural poverty and systemic inequality and the ways in which these are manifested in space and place. The primary focus is on the effectiveness of policies and laws shaping land tenure and governance in the democratic era and the extent to which they have been able to engage with these spatially differentiated legacies in order to promote spatial justice.

The report provides a brief history of farm labour in South Africa tracing its roots in slavery and colonial dispossession through to the emergence of state supported commercial agriculture and the subsequent deregulation of the agricultural sector. This is with a view to contextualising the examination of tenure security and identifying the impacts on people living and working on land owned by others. The report provides a scan of the legal reforms and measures instituted in the first decade of democracy in order to reverse the injustices of the past.

Livelihood stressors in southern Africa, such as HIV/Aids and climate change, do not act in isolation but rather interact concurrently in complex socio-ecological systems with diverse, interrelated and compounded affects. Households experience differential vulnerability to such stressors based on contextual factors such as geographical location, income level and the gender and age of its members.

Local level, collective small-scale farming projects in the Kat River Valley, like elsewhere, have proven difficult to sustain.  Various factors from macro-level policies to local level social and political dynamics were found to hinder or block the success of such projects.  Some of the most challenging factors relate to history and path dependency, prevailing neoliberal agricultural policies and discourses, narrow markets, internal conflicts, lack of local capacity and unclear and insecure land tenure.

In recent years,proponents of 'green and clean fuel' have argued that the costs of overreliance on fossil fuels could be reduced through transition to biofuels such as bio-ethanol. Global biofuel discourses suggest that any transition to biofuel invariably results in significant benefits, including energy independence, job creation, development of agro-industrial centres at local level and high revenue generations for the state with minimum negative impacts on the environment.

This policy brief draws on three sources of data from a study undertaken in Lesseyton in Lukanji Local Municipality and Willowvale in Mbashe Local Municipality, in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa.The aim was to understand the vulnerability context of households in the two sites and how they coped with multiple shocks and stresses, with an emphasis on various types of safety nets. Methods included a survey that specifically targeted vulnerable households, data from several community workshops and in-depth life history interviews.