7 October 2004
MAWUBUYE UMHLABA: LAND! FOOD! JOBS!
The South African Communist Party (SACP) calls on the millions of landless people, the rural poor, rural women, rural youth and farm workers to join the 2004 Red October Campaign month-long programme of action which will involve ongoing networking with a range of progressive forces, consultation and popular mobilisation. Party branches will be conducting household surveys in targeted rural and farming areas. We will hold tribunals, forums and mass meetings, and we plan for a culminating National Day of Action for Land, on Saturday, 6 November 2004. On this day, the Communist Party will lead a national march to the offices of Agri South Africa, the National Departments of Land Affairs and Agriculture, and the Reserve Bank in support of demands for accelerated land and agrarian reform. The primary target of this campaign is commercial agriculture who remain the main beneficiaries of apartheid and colonial land ownership patterns.
We demand:
The national march will be supported by provincial marches:
In addition to the National Day of Action, the Communist Party will also make a submission to the Parliamentary hearings on the progress of Land Reform scheduled for 19-20 October in the National Assembly.
The Communist Party will also highlight the importance of food security as part of land and agrarian reform through a World Food Day Celebrations on 16 October. The main Communist Party’s national event will be in Kimberly in the Northern Cape.
The Communist Party is convening a National Consultative Conference on 15 October to mobilise trade unions, civil society, churches, land rights organisations, and other stakeholders. This Conference is aimed at mobilising support and endorsement of this campaign by a wide range of social forces.
In our election manifesto, the ANC together with its alliance partners undertook to “speed up land reform, with 30% of agricultural land redistributed by 2014.” In the course of our mobilisation campaign, the Party will seek to add impetus to this commitment to speed up the process. The Communist Party makes no apology for demanding that land must be given to the workers and the poor as the principal beneficiaries.
Access to, ownership and control of productive land by the landless workers and the poor
The Communist Party does not support the present willing-buyer willing-seller approach as it subjects land reform to the capitalist market and is not an effective means for achieving the objective of substantive land reform.
The Communist Party calls for the underpinning of land restitution and land reform with effective infrastructure, agricultural extension programmes and ongoing assistance. The emphasis on land reform must be to ensure household food security, cooperatives for inputs and marketing, sustainable rural communities and small-scale farming.
Whatever prospects there are for smallholder agricultural production in South Africa, they are likely to be curtailed by the existing market-led land reform dispensation. Linked to this is the dominant reading of the property clause in the country’s constitution as simply protecting property rights instead of also being read as a clause and mandate for land reform. The logic of this paradigm leads the state to be a mere facilitator for agreements to be reached. This is useful but not adequate. The state must be more active in acquiring private land for redistribution instead of the current focus on state land disposal. 25% of the 87% of land denied to black people since 1913 is state land. State land disposal undermines the strategic role of the state in land usage and ownership. State land disposal also means that ownership by apartheid beneficiaries remains largely untouched.
The Communist Party underpins the relevance of sustainable livelihoods and sustainable land and agrarian reform is central to this. Access to relatively small pieces of land for productive purposes is an essential element in the range of survival strategies required by the landless and women in particular. Besides agricultural production, such a strategy could also comprise additional resources of income such as the processing and packaging of agricultural produce, the production and sale of other products, sustainable self-employment based on co-operatives, remittances, etc.
For these reasons, we further demand:
Access to basic services and rights for farm-workers and their families
Notwithstanding the minimum wage sectoral determination for farm-workers, and security of tenure legislation, the conditions of workers and their families on the 46,000 commercial farms remain, generally, little changed. We have an abundance of evidence coming in from our rural branches of illegal deductions from wages, of continued illegal evictions and impounding of workers’ livestock, and of the general abuse of this sector of the working class and women in particular. This is the case in Groutville, Utrecht, Tzaneen, Bethal, Stellenbosch and many other small rural towns.
Specifically, we want to highlight recent developments on the pending closure of the Tzaneen-based Sapekoe Tea Estates without the consultation and participation of workers and their union, the Food and Allied Workers’ Union (FAWU). We call on the management of Sapekoe to stop their unilateralism & to consult with the workers and their union. We are currently in discussions with FAWU to include a programme of mass action targeting Sapekoe during the Red October campaign.
In general, we will use the Red October month to campaign for an end to all forms of violence, victimisation and abuse; and end to child labour, and for fee education and health-care for the children of farmer workers. We will also campaign for the extension of Justice Centres into rural areas, and for an increase in Department of Labour resources to more effectively monitor farms.
We will hold workers’ tribunals and mass meetings with farm workers and farm dwellers starting on the weekend of 9-10 October in all provinces with the key activities being:
We therefore welcome the initiative by the Minister of Labour to convene imbizos with farm workers.
National Land Summit
We call for a National Land Summit within the next 12 months. The National Land Summit must bring together government, farm workers, landless people, rural women, landowners & agricultural capital in order to:
In the immediate period, we call for the empowerment and resourcing of farm workers, rural dwellers, rural women, the landless, the workers and the poor to ensure that they can make their voices, aspirations and interests are heard in the Agri-BEE Charter process. Workers and the rural poor must also be afforded a much greater opportunity to input into the Agri-BEE Charter, to ensure that its stated “broad-based” approach is translated into relevant policy and programmes and linked to accelerated land reform.
In preparation for the National Land Summit, we also call for an audit of all land transferred to individuals and communities, through the land reform, in order to establish the extent of real impact on livelihoods of land reform beneficiaries. The audit must be conducted before the National Land Summit. We also call for provincial land summits to precede the National Land Summit.
The primary question that agricultural capital must be asked at the Summit is: what is their contribution to democracy and development?
The Financial Sector Campaign
The Red October campaign will be connected to our ongoing financial sector campaign, to ensure that micro-credit is available for effective land reform and the need to revise the R1,4 billion set aside in the Financial Sector Charter for agriculture. In this connection, as per the joint SACP-COSATU statement issued yesterday, we reject the unilateral decision of the financial sector to set targets and amounts for black economic empowerment. This amount of R1,4 billion - and the targets which are set out - have not yet been approved by the Financial Charter Council (FCC), which is scheduled to meet next week. This body - which represents government, labour and civil society, as well as the finance industry - is supposed to exercise democratic control of the sector, but it is effectively being sidelined.
Secondly the biggest single item is the R50 billion for funding narrow-based equity transactions, which will once again go to an elite group of individuals who have already become rich through deals of this type. There is no indication of a move towards a more broad-based form of BEE.
The remaining amount (R72,5 billion) is targeted at social projects, like low-cost housing, bridges and agriculture, but the amounts do not come near to what is needed in the sectors identified. This is a very small proportion of the financial sector's total assets of more than R1 trillion, and it is not clear how much of this total would have been invested in the sectors identified anyway.
We reaffirm our insistence on the democratisation of the finance sector and demands that this funding process be halted until there has been a thorough discussion involving all stakeholders at the FCC.
In this regard, the specific activities will include the launching of the Financial Sector Campaign Coalition (FSCC) in the Northern Cape on 23 October and other provinces. There will be a joint march with SAMWU to banks in Evander (Mpumalanga) during the SAMWU Provincial Congress on 8 October.
Conclusion
The Red October Campaign is just a start of ongoing mass mobilisation on land and agrarian reform and an intensification of mass pressure on the financial sector.