Banking on Democracy: agrarian development, negotiated reforms, and the political-economy of land issues in post-apartheid South Africa
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The Bank and new frontiersThe agricultural industry began receiving much attention from the World Bank during McNamara’s tenure in the late 1960s; under a new mandate of accelerating economic growth and to reduce poverty, the Bank expanded its operations to include, among other sectors, the financing of agricultural expansion. The Bank’s position on the benefits of agrarian industrialisation is quite patent in the nature of policy discourse it articulates [ CITATION Gre83 \l 7177 ]. ‘Sound’ agricultural policies prioritise the improvement of farmers’ working conditions by ensuring they have access to land, materials essential to agricultural production, building capacity for strong agricultural research, and by introducing incentive systems for production and investment[ CITATION Wor82 \l 7177 ]. In 2008, the World Bank affirmed its views on the role of agriculture in the pursuit of development arguing that it, as well as labour and migration, provided an avenue out of rural poverty[ CITATION Wor08 \l 7177 ]. The report on Agriculture for Development maintained that the view that agriculture is a “vital development tool for achieving the Millennium Development Goal that calls for halving by 2015 the share of people suffering from extreme poverty and hunger” (ibid, xiii); in this view, agrarian industrialisation is presented as both a source of livelihood for many poor communities and a key producer of food and, by extension, food security (ibid). Through entrenching these in the conditionalities associated with development aid, the Bank imposed these policy prescriptions to lending countries with little to no regard for the appropriateness thereof in various political contexts, and with little proof that the benefits would be reaped equitably as the neoliberal ‘trickle-down’ notion presumes[ CITATION For05 \l 2057 ]. This presumption becomes quite problematic in the African context where patterns of land ownership are defined by a history of capitalist accumulation by dispossession (ibid). Keeping its mention of addressing the unequal, colonial landholding trends to an alarming minimum, the Bank instead emphasises the need for states to adopt land reform policies that promote a transactional, market capitalist approach to distribution (i.e. willing-buyer, willing-seller). The broader implications of policies of this nature – those that scantily consider the political nuances of context – can be observed in many societies. Download 32.53 Kb. Share with your friends:
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