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that the long-run effect of such a grant in stimulating aggregate demand in the bottom of the economy will benefit growth. The ruling party’s concerns about the risks of a basic income grant seemed to be political and ideological. Economic planners fear the spectres of dependency and argue that the provision of a basic income grant would create perverse incentives. In other words, it is easier for people to remain economically inactive and parasitical upon the working population. Oddly enough, a universal citizen’s grant has also not really found popular support among people on the ground. It is noticeably absent for instance, in the demands articulated in service delivery protests. It seems that poor people themselves, like neoliberal policymakers, are also wedded to the dream of finding independence and self-respect in “proper jobs”. PLAAS research has been motivated by the desire to look deeper than these stereotypical representations about the supposed characteristics of the poor and their supposed propensity to become dependent on welfare grants. The Art of Survival The following five points detail the ways in which poor people survive, the way people seek to make a life on the harsh and adverse terrain of South African society. First, social networks of reciprocal exchange play a crucial role. In large parts of South Africa, migrancy and domestic fluidity have created spatially extended, many-rooted social networks. These networks are not centred in the rural areas nor in the urban areas but are rhizomes, with many roots and many centres in different parts of the country. They allow individuals and households to redistribute resources, opportunities, costs and shocks so as to ameliorate poverty and vulnerability. They form a key aspect of informal systems of social protection that enable the resources and benefits accruing from formal employment and cash transfers to reach well beyond the originally intended recipients. Secondly, as crucial as these networks are, it is important not to be complacent. The existence of these structures of reciprocal aid should not lead us to overestimate the harmonious, moral and caring character of rural life and the potential of the “subsistence solidarities” of marginalized people. These networks are poorly resourced. At best they allow people to eke out minor resources accrued from the formal economy. In addition, the practices of reciprocation on which these networks depend are fraught with dire and sometimes desperate conflict. Reciprocal exchange between the poor rarely happens on the terrain of equality. Those disadvantaged by inadequate access to resources, unequal social power relations, local patriarchal ideologies about gender, identity and other factors can find themselves even more exploited at the receiving end of punishingly hard bargains. AGRICULTURE, FOOD SECURITY AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH | 69
Thirdly, cash transfers play a central role in oiling the gears and supplementing the benefits of these processes of reciprocal exchange. Particularly important in South Africa is the fact that cash transfers are universal and unconditional. Perhaps cash transfers are one of the ways in which modernity arrives in these networks of reciprocal exchange. They allow many who would otherwise be marginalized within these networks of reciprocal exchange to transact more powerfully. Pensions, disability grants and child grants subsidize informal businesses. They allow people to plough, to invest in their homesteads and in small businesses. This illustrates the baselessness of South African middle class fears about poor people’s dependency on handouts. Cash transfers, far from crowding out remittances, allow individuals and households to crowd investments in. They are essential to sustaining the vanishingly small ledges on which survival of South Africa’s marginalized poor depend. Fourthly, these practices are part of enormously complex survival strategies in which formal and informal employment, cash transfers, wages, and reciprocal exchange are brought together in sophisticated ways. The most successful marginalized households manage to engage in a kind of improvisatory bricolage in which a wide variety of activities are brought together so that they supplement and complement each other in synergistic ways. Together these activities constitute a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The reductive, hand-to-mouth connotations of “survivalism” do not do justice to the reality. Survival requires not only a willingness for super-self-exploitation but also knowledge, know-how and experience and an artful, canny, even cunning ability to negotiate conflictual terrain, spot seemly insignificant opportunities, and then bend them to one’s will. Fifthly, within these multifaceted strategies, informal self-employment has a complex, entangled relationship with the formal sector. Household strategies are hybrid, comprising formal and informal economic activities that subsidize, supplement and complement one another. Within these strategies, informal economic activity plays a subsidiary and dependent role. In South Africa, far from the informal economy being a separate realm, informal economic activity is dependent on, and subsidized by, formal activities. In a different sense, the unpaid care work of rural women can be seen as unseen subsidy to urban wages and household production. At the same time, it is also possible to regard many kinds of informal sector activity as marginalized and beleaguered by competition from the formal sector. Informal economic activity – particularly trading and retail – exists in the interstices of the corporate economy, persisting in tiny economic niches defined by locational advantage or by culturally specific preferences and markets not yet targeted or occupied by “big retail”. 70 | AGRICULTURE, FOOD SECURITY AND INCLUSIVE GROWTH
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Agriculture, Food Security and Incl
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Design & Print Prints & Proms, Rott
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4 | AGRICULTURE, FOOD SECURITY AND
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(organized by Initiatives in Critic
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In the opening chapter, Olivier De
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policies need to be looked at caref
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Jan Douwe van der Ploeg acknowledge
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In conclusion, it is clear that the
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any gain would be in the short-term
Page 19 and 20: equire 35 million hectares to be pr
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Page 29 and 30: and of voters cannot be ignored, bu
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Page 35 and 36: this astonishing explosion of inter
Page 37 and 38: What are the driving forces behind
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Page 41 and 42: whole range of different agencies a
Page 43 and 44: We also made recommendations for in
Page 45 and 46: questions have to be asked about th
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Page 57 and 58: does not need to buy into either of
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Page 63 and 64: FAO (2009), Global Agriculture towa
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Page 79 and 80: EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS: Max Spoor
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