Dr.

Rick

de Satge

Parliament is processing, or is due to process, six bills that have particular significance for the rights of people living in SA’s former homelands. Three draft bills have also been published for comment. Among these are the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Amendment Bill and the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Bill, which together echo and seek to entrench important aspects of the Bantu Authorities Act that shaped apartheid.

The pleas of thousands of rural people who made difficult journeys to attend public hearings across the country are largely ignored in the amended version of the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Bill set to be adopted by the National Assembly this week.

Farmers’ interest group AgriSA last week released its own land audit. This filled in a major blank in the land reform and policy field: How many black emerging farmers have bought farms outside government’s land reform programme? We now have a part answer: they bought 4.3 million hectares.  Other findings from this study are contested and methodological flaws are highlighted.

The mainstream in South Africa is paying little attention to the world outside the cities. This is a mistake because the future of the country’s economy may depend on battles raging in its far-flung rural areas. The latest sign of this battle is an attempt by some in the governing African National Congress to pass the Traditional Leadership and Governance Framework Bill, which will allow traditional leaders to enrich themselves at the expense of rural people.

Residents of mining areas testified at the Parliamentary High-Level panel on assessment of key legislation and acceleration of fundamental change about the acute disruptions caused in their lives and livelihoods by mining and their concerns are dealt with in several recommended amendments to legislation.

The Ingonyama Trust headed by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu should be dissolved and the law that established it on the eve of South Africa’s liberation in 1994 should be repealed. This Act has effectively converted informal rural ownership rights to leasehold. Just days after the report was released, the Ingonyama Trust ramped up its campaign to persuade rural citizens to surrender their informal land rights to the Trust and to accept 40-year leases that could be cancelled for non-payment or other violations of the contract.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) and Reos Partners organised a learning exchange aimed to deepening the understanding on the linkages between agriculture and social protection, focusing on lessons and experiences from southern Africa. The purpose of this learning exchange was to facilitate sharing and compiling of lessons learned in the design, implementation and institutional arrangements of linkages between social protection, food security and agricultural-based livelihoods, including good practice

This research report contains an overview of two innovations that form part of a project called Supporting Smallholder Agriculture (SSA) conducted by the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL). The two innovations documented in this report simultaneously investigated market segmentation and standards - related challenges among smallholder farmers in two parts of the country.

Between late 2014 and June 2016, South Africa experienced an El Niño-related drought, which various reports claim to be the worst meteorological drought in the southern Africa region in 35 years. In February 2016, the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) commissioned a drought impact assessment (DIA) in the Mopani district of Limpopo province, as part of its Agro-ecology Awareness (AeA) project, and Supporting Smallholder Agriculture programme. This report provides the findings of this assessment.