Farm dwellers – that is, people who live on commercial farms owned by someone other than themselves – are a heterogeneous social group whose socio-economic rights, including those to land, continue to be violated and neglected. Little progress has been made in realising the constitutional rights farm dwellers have to housing, water, sanitation and security of tenure. A key reason for this is that farm dwellers are not ‘legible’ to the state: there is no data available that enables the state to plan and implement programmes targeting them.

On 20 August 2019 at 10h00 the Constitutional Court handed down judgment in an application for leave to appeal against the judgment and order of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA).  This case concerned the failure by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (Department) to process land tenant applications submitted in terms of the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act 3 of 1996 (LTA).  Because of that failure, the Land Claims Court (LCC) ordered the appointment of a Special Master for labour tenants to assist the Department in its implementation of the LTA.

The paper investigates whether farm dwellers in the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province of South Africa are subject to a “double exposure”: vulnerable both to the impacts of post-apartheid agrarian dynamics and to the risks of climate change. The evidence is drawn from a 2017 survey that was undertaken by the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), which is a land rights Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), of 843 farm dweller households. Data on the current living conditions and livelihoods was collected on 15.3% of the farm dweller population in the area.