Navigating the contradictory dynamics of production and social reproduction in collectively owned agricultural enterprises in South Africa's land reform

Abstract

The paper explores how beneficiaries of South Africa's land reform programme attempt to navigate the contradictory dynamics of production and social reproduction in collectively owned agricultural enterprises. The Mphuzanyoni Communal Property Association in KwaZulu-Natal province farms with commercial beef herds and the Mayime Cooperative in the Eastern Cape province is engaged in a joint venture dairy farming scheme in partnership with an agribusiness firm. Severe tensions are evident between the social reproduction of households and the requirements of simple or expanded reproduction of agricultural enterprises. Bernstein's concept of competing ‘funds’ is used to examine struggles over production and reproduction on the farms, in which members of socially differentiated households contest divergent visions for the collective enterprises. Conflicts centre on how labour and capital should be mobilised, how income and other benefits in kind should be distributed to households and whether or not income should be invested for purposes of simple or expanded reproduction of the enterprise. Challenges of governance are rooted in these conflicts rather than in group ownership as a form of property right.