The Social Dynamics of Labor Shortage in South African Small-Scale Agriculture

Summary

This article examines the relationship between unemployment, family structure, and labor allocation in rural South Africa. Chronic joblessness has meant that many young, unemployed adults remain in the parental home. However, their productive labor is often not utilized in family farming. Using detailed ethnographic data on intra-household social relations, I argue that the prohibitive cost of marriage, and its consequent decline, has led to the erosion of obligations formerly implied by the “conjugal contract”. Young, unmarried adults often have limited responsibilities to provide labor or income to the parental home, diminishing the overall viability of small-scale farming.

Introduction

This paper addresses a conundrum in the literature on small-scale farming in post-apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, land use for food production in many rural areas is limited by labor and resource shortages (Andrew et al., 2003, Feynes and Meyer, 2003). On the other hand, entrenched structural unemployment means that rural youth are frequently unable to find work either in urban or rural areas and therefore constitute a potential pool of rural family labor. Why does this surplus labor appear to be under-utilized in farming? The paper sheds light on this puzzle through a focus on the social dynamics of small-scale farming in a village in Makhathini in northern KwaZulu-Natal. I argue that structural unemployment, beginning in the 1970s and continuing with increasing severity to the present day, has had a range of historically specific effects. Unable to afford the costs of marriage or to establish their own homes, and bearing disproportionally the negative social consequences of widespread joblessness, young people focus their attention on individual forms of economic and social pursuit rather than on the reproduction of the parental home. In this setting, I suggest, it is unrealistic to expect the family to operate as a cohesive productive unit.

The context which frames this discussion is the crisis of social reproduction created by a double burden of unemployment and limited agricultural capacity. Rooted in a historical legacy of colonial dispossession and accumulation, South Africa’s agrarian landscape continues to be dominated by large-scale agribusiness while small-scale farming remains peripheral and limited in scope. Given these structural conditions shaping the unequal distribution of land in South Africa and the politically-charged debates surrounding tenure and land reform, access to land is often highlighted as a key factor inhibiting the expansion of small-scale farming, especially in the context of a rapidly growing population (Agergaard and Birch-Thomsen, 2006, Aliber, 2003, Aliber et al., 2009, Aliber and Hall, 2010, Cousins, 2007).

However, data collected during intensive anthropological field work in northern KwaZulu-Natal suggest that even when people do have access to plots, these are usually cultivated partially or not at all. The under-cultivation of land in rural areas across South Africa, including the former “homelands”, is now widely recognized in the literature (Andrew et al., 2003, Beinart, 2013).¹ Several explanations have emerged, in addition to those relating to land access, to account for the constraints on small-scale farming. These include: soil erosion caused partly by overgrazing and exacerbated by the steep terrain characteristic of many former “homeland” areas (Andrew et al., 2003, Feynes and Meyer, 2003); risks created by unpredictable climatic variation and water scarcity (Ortmann & Machethe, 2003); risks of crop damage due to a shortage of fencing, theft, damage by livestock, and a shortage of herding labor (Andrew et al., 2003, Aliber et al., 2009); limited market opportunities especially due to competition from large-scale agricultural and retail sectors (Andrew et al., 2003, p. 3–4); increasing capital costs (Bryceson, 2002); and a lack of appropriate agricultural support, especially for land reform beneficiaries (Aliber and Cousins, 2013, Hall, 2007).

One of the most prominent explanations alongside issues of land access is the shortage of capital, inputs, and labor that inhibit farming even where suitable land is available. This area of the discussion provides a link to the large body of literature on rural livelihoods in South Africa which emphasizes the diversification of income earning strategies across a range of farm and non-farm activities in order to reduce economic vulnerability (Francis, 2000). Farming is reliant on these wider strategies because typically it is sustained by the transfer of non-farm income to the purchase of inputs. However, the insecurity of those income flows in the context of unemployment and labor casualization exacerbates the risks associated with high input costs (Cousins, 2013, Fraser et al., 2003). Some scholars have argued that the reliable monthly income provided by government cash transfers enhances recipients’ ability to farm because cash transfers provide a steady, albeit small, source of income to buy inputs (Altman & Boyce, 2008). However, other research findings contradict this, suggesting that people are deterred from farming because cash transfers provide the bulk of household food requirements (Thornton, 2008). The effect of cash transfers on small-scale farming under a range of conditions requires further research.

This paper will not attempt to tackle all of these interlocking explanations, but will focus on some aspects of the relationship between unemployment, household structure, and labor allocation in rural agriculture. The literature attributes shortage of labor to the absence of men due to urban work opportunities as well as to pressures on female labor in domestic duties (Andrew et al., 2003). However, in the current context of deindustrialization in which rural–urban mobility is decreasing (Bank & Minkley, 2005), the first of these explanations requires closer examination. My research in KwaZulu-Natal shows that many young men and women remain in rural areas instead of traveling to the city, providing a pool of potential labor for many households. In this paper, I build on William Beinart’s (2013) observations about under-farming in the Eastern Cape, among which he states that many households were unable to mobilize the family labor especially of young adults. Viewing this same dynamic in northern KwaZulu-Natal, I argue that the failure of older members of the family to mobilize the labor of their younger kin is one outcome of the individualization of livelihoods caused partly by a decline in marriage. Young adults find themselves in limbo, having entered working age but unable to secure employment and consequently unable to marry. As a result, they remain in their natal home. In contrast to many women who are integrated into the home through domestic work and childcare, young men are often removed socially and economically from the parental home, even though they sleep and eat in it. This dissociation of unmarried men from the household renders the prospects for cooperation of family members in agriculture limited and challenges the notion of the “household” as a cohesive unit of production. In addressing these social dimensions of South Africa’s economic and livelihood crisis, this article considers how the viability of farming is linked to what has broadly become known as a crisis of social reproduction. I do not treat social dynamics as a separate category from the widely reported economic factors that place constraints on farming. On the contrary, drawing on the work of Mark Hunter (2010) I argue that at their root, these practices are the outcome of changes to family structures that have emerged in the context of a political economy of unemployment.

The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 I present background information about the location in which field work was carried out and describe the methodology. In Section 3, I use ethnographic data to demonstrate how social dynamics at the level of the household influence the allocation of labor in agriculture. In Section 4, I turn to the demographic, social, and historical factors that have influenced this alteration in social relationships, particularly focusing on declining marriage rates caused by deepening structural unemployment.