Namibia country report

economy” (ibid.: 429). Economic activities had to be brought to the reserve areas througha “broad programme of capital expenditure [in which] the various population groups canparticipate [without] disrupting their existing strong traditional family and homeland ties”(cited in Innes 1980: 577).It followed from these basic assumptions that agriculture in the communal areas had to be“modernised”. More specifically:[The Commission] consider[ed] the development of animal husbandry in all its branchesto be vitally important to the inhabitants of these areas. In this development the efficientmarketing of livestock and of meat is a decisive factor ... (RSA 1964: 277).As far as the Commission was concerned, the improvement of livestock husbandry wasprimarily a matter of improving animal health and the quality of breeding stock.Although the Odendaal Commission was “much more an intervention into politics thanagricultural production per se ...” (Pankhurst 1996: 418), its proposals on agricultural developmentwere taken up and operationalised in the Five Year Plan for the Development of theNative Areas (hereafter “5-Year Plan”, SWA [1966]) in the mid 1960s. This plan recommendedspecific interventions for improving agricultural production in the communal areas. Theunderlying assumption guiding its deliberations was that “agricultural planning must ... pavethe way in converting an existing subsistence economy to an exchange economy” (ibid.: 94).The basis for “scientific agricultural planning” (ibid.) hinged on two main elements:• z the classification of communal areas into agro-ecological zones in order to capture theecological characteristics of each area; and• z an “assessment of the carrying capacity of the grazing and the determination of the sizeof economic farming units” in order to estimate the “ultimate human carrying capacityfor the region to be planned (ibid.: 95).“Scientific agricultural planning” had to be complemented by an agricultural extensionprogramme “based on transforming the traditional subsistence farming pattern into oneconforming to the requirements of a market economy” (ibid.). Extension work should beaimed at improving livestock production, more specifically at controlling disease “and toprovide the necessary amenities for rational livestock farming” (ibid.: 97). The 5-Year Planalso proposed the establishment of training and research projects to support the processof “modernising” agriculture.Recommendations of the 5-Year Plan for the modernisation of agriculture and thus thetransition from subsistence to commercial farming included proposals on transformingcustomary land tenure systems into more individualised land tenure. For the predominantlyOtjiherero-speaking communal areas, for example, it recommended “a large scale fencingprogramme”. Here, argued the 5-Year Plan, “proper pasture rotation” was “a prerequisitefor optimal utilisation of available resources” and could only be achieved through enclosure:Section Livelihoods A ● 2. Land after Reform Land and Reform: Poverty: Namibia National country Policy report Context (2010) ● 27