Commercial Agriculture in South Africa since 1994: 'Natural, Simply Capitalism'

The paper provides a survey of commercial agriculture in South Africa since 1994. It emphasizes, first, how effectively organized agriculture positioned itself for the new dispensation, with the help of the last apartheid government, and, second, the importance of the removal of limits on the international mobility of South African capital and commodities imposed on the apartheid regime. The lacunae and ambiguities of the African National Congress concerning land and agricultural policy during the political transition of 19904 and since then in government are also important here. The paper considers transformation(s) with respect to farm labour, regulating agribusiness, and land reform, black farming, and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE, specifically AgriBEE). It concludes that the course of South African agriculture and agricultural policy since 1994 has done little, if anything, to transform the circumstances of the dispossessed rural and urban classes of labour whose crises of social reproduction remain grounded in the inheritances of racialized inequality.