Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms and abbreviations
- Map of the Cape provinces showing the location of the case studies
- Part 1 Setting the scene: land and agrarian reform in postapartheid South Africa
- Part 2 ‘Mind the gap’: discrepancies between policies and practices in South African land reform
- Part 3 Competing knowledge regimes in communal area agriculture
- 14 What constitutes ‘the agrarian’ in rural Eastern Cape African settlements?
- 15 The Massive Food Production Programme: a case study of agricultural policy continuities and changes
- 16 The Massive Food Production Programme: does it work?
- 17 ‘Still feeding ourselves’: everyday practices of the Siyazondla Homestead Food Production Programme
- 18 Cultivators in action, Siyazondla inaction? Trends and potentials in homestead cultivation
- 19 Smallholder irrigation schemes as an agrarian development option for the Cape region
- 20 Cattle and rural development in the Eastern Cape: the Nguni project revisited
- About the authors
- Index
16 - The Massive Food Production Programme: does it work?
from Part 3 - Competing knowledge regimes in communal area agriculture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables and figures
- Acknowledgements
- Acronyms and abbreviations
- Map of the Cape provinces showing the location of the case studies
- Part 1 Setting the scene: land and agrarian reform in postapartheid South Africa
- Part 2 ‘Mind the gap’: discrepancies between policies and practices in South African land reform
- Part 3 Competing knowledge regimes in communal area agriculture
- 14 What constitutes ‘the agrarian’ in rural Eastern Cape African settlements?
- 15 The Massive Food Production Programme: a case study of agricultural policy continuities and changes
- 16 The Massive Food Production Programme: does it work?
- 17 ‘Still feeding ourselves’: everyday practices of the Siyazondla Homestead Food Production Programme
- 18 Cultivators in action, Siyazondla inaction? Trends and potentials in homestead cultivation
- 19 Smallholder irrigation schemes as an agrarian development option for the Cape region
- 20 Cattle and rural development in the Eastern Cape: the Nguni project revisited
- About the authors
- Index
Summary
A critical analysis of the different aspects of policymaking – design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation – requires a deconstruction of the idea of planned development. Its theoretical conceptions, its notions of time and space and its normative assumptions all have to be critically examined. This chapter aims to adopt this sort of critical approach towards development, taking as its object of study the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP) in the Eastern Cape. Rather than approaching this programme as a linear practice, it views it as an embedded practice, shaped by negotiations and networks that cut across formal institutional boundaries. These negotiations and networks operate on multiple levels, and involve multiple values and realities. The outcomes of a programme such as the MFPP, I argue, are shaped by the ways in which human needs and desires are formulated as well as by the unfolding of organisational capabilities, the development of power relations, the growth of skills and knowledge, and the clash of different ways of ordering the world (Long 2001). It is essential, therefore, to look at how actors (individually or in a network) process social experiences and devise ways of coping with life under circumstances that are partly created by interventions such as the MFPP.
I begin the discussion of the programme by describing its design and implementation. I go on to examine the theoretical assumptions that underpin the intervention. I then explore the multiple realities of the rural Eastern Cape province in order to show the different ways in which rural beneficiaries have accommodated the MFPP in their agricultural activities. I focus on three cases which have been selected because they are representative of some of the different labour patterns and land tenure systems that prevail in the Eastern Cape. The cases are the Majali MFPP project in Buffalo City Municipality, representative of communal lands in the former Ciskei homeland; the Ngxakaxha MFPP project in Mbhashe Municipality, typifying communal lands in the former Transkei homeland; and the Ndakana farm project in Amahlati Municipality, which represents private land ownership in an area that was formerly known as a ‘black spot’, a small area in which black people were allowed to own land in the apartheid era.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In the Shadow of PolicyEveryday Practices In South African Land and Agrarian Reform, pp. 217 - 230Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2013