This paper was originally presented in May 1995 at a conference on "Agrarian Questions in the late Twentieth Century" at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and has been published in the conference proceedings. It circulated widely in South Africa, where some of the ideas have been incorporated into the National Spatial Development Framework and the White Paper on Rural Development. It is also the first paper I wrote after returning to work in my native South Africa after nearly two decades of research in different parts of Asia.

In retrospect, I realize the extent to which the paper reflects the profound ways in which Bruce’s work has influenced my thinking. The argument about transcending the rural-urban dichotomy draws directly on his own work, as does the section of the paper addressing questions of East Asian land reforms. In addition to these very specific influences, my understandings of "development" have been deeply shaped by his sharply-honed and eloquent critiques of accepted wisdom. It is with enormous respect and affection that I dedicate this paper to him.

Multiple Livelihoods and Interstitial Spaces

Much of the debate over reconstruction and development in South Africa today not only takes for granted the existence of a sharp urban-rural dichotomy, but also reinforces it. One widely held view is that South Africa's future is metropolitan and industrial, and that resources should be concentrated in major urban complexes. Critics of this alleged urban bias argue instead for a rural and agricultural strategy, and for creating peasants or small farmers wherever land becomes available through the market.

These competing visions of "the city" versus "the countryside" are problematic on a number of counts, not least of which are the political and social forces (or lack thereof!) that underpin them. Among these problems are the assumptions they share. Both the metropolitan vision and the small farmer road to agrarian reform presume, in effect, the rationalization of agriculture, combined with a straightforward process of urbanization and proletarianization.

What's missing from this linear model of agrarian transition is the hybridity and multi-linearity of late 20th century capitalisms. In the South African context, the urban-rural dichotomy also ignores two key realities. First is the issue of multiple livelihoods. Large numbers of poor people cobble together livelihoods from a multiplicity of different sources, often constantly moving between places and desperately trying to hang on to small landholdings. Multiple, diversified livelihood strategies and the retention of small landholdings are not just an apartheid hangover, destined to disappear in the context of political and economic liberalization. Nor are they in any way peculiar to South Africa. Rather, they are a defining feature of late 20th century capitalism, exemplifying both the retreat of the state from welfare provision and the imperatives of flexible accumulation and global competition.

The urban-rural dichotomy also ignores what I shall call interstitial spaces - spaces neither metropolitan nor deep rural, which embody two key thrusts of apartheid spatial engineering: forced removals and industrial decentralization. Since the 1960s, forced removals and expulsions from white-owned farms produced the massive agglomerations of people in the former bantustans, aptly termed "displaced urbanization." Interstitial spaces were also the focal points of huge state subsidies during the 1980s designed to shift industry to these labor reservoirs. Industrial growth in the 1980s was concentrated almost entirely in these areas, which were also the major locus of foreign - mainly Taiwanese - investment in South Africa.

Nowadays these places are widely viewed as distasteful relics of apartheid, which will conveniently wither away once the props - most notably industrial subsidies - are pulled out from under them. In the late 1980s, large corporate interests based in metropolitan areas launched a major attack on industrial decentralization policies, which were modified along neoliberal lines in 1991. The reduction in subsidies coincided, of course, with the lifting of sanctions and the wider opening of the South African economy to the icy winds of global competition.

Central to the metropolitan vision is the presumption that industry will "naturally" reagglomerate in major urban areas. A major shaking out process is, indeed, underway and many industries have disappeared from remote parts of former bantustans. In some of the more strategically located decentralization points, however, new impulses of industrial dispersal seem to be taking hold.

From a broader comparative perspective, these impulses are by no means peculiar to South Africa. Since the 1970s and 1980s, tendencies towards industrial dispersal emerged in many different parts of the world - most dramatically, of course, in China where the massive surge in industrial growth has come largely from rural industries.

These tendencies are subject to multiple interpretations. One is a neoliberal argument that emerging patterns of industrial decentralization are the consequence of lifting the distortions and urban biases associated with import substitution industrialization. Taiwan provides the ideal-type that informs this interpretation. Others view these tendencies through the lenses of flexible specialization and hold out the promise of a post-Fordist future characterized by industrial districts and communities of small firms bound together by bonds of trust such as those in the Third Italy. Countering these optimistic interpretations and visions is a far more critical emphasis on the increasing mobility of capital and intensifying exploitation of labor.

Emerging patterns of industrial decentralization in different parts of the world are unquestionnably part of an integrated set of global processes - but the key point is that these processes are constituted and experienced in different ways in different local settings. In short, superficially similar patterns of industrial dispersal encompass multiple trajectories or paths of socio-spatial restructuring, agriculture-industry linkages, and agrarian transformation. Accordingly, the salient questions are what are the conditions that generate particular patterns, who are the winners and losers, what are the dynamics by which they operate, and what are the possibilities for change? This approach calls for close understanding of the organization of production and labor relations; but it is also essential to situate these forms of production in the context of local institutional configurations and conditions of access to resources - most notably land - as well as in relation to larger regional and national structures and processes.

What this means in South Africa is the need for contextualized, historically-specific understandings of the forces at work in interstitial spaces. This focus also illuminates the connections among three crucial debates that are being conducted largely in isolation from one another: (1) industrial restructuring and the imperatives of competition as South Africa re-engages with the global economy; (2) agrarian reform; and (3) the reconstitution of the state at the local level.

Another reason why interstitial spaces are particularly interesting and important is that they represent niches of the global economy. Although the subsidies that initially attracted foreign investment have declined, local governments in a number of small towns have been by-passing the nation state, and actively wooing foreign investors - predominantly although not exclusively those from Taiwan. Indeed, much of the new foreign investment coming into South Africa is from Asia, and is locating in interstitial spaces. The way Asian investment is operating in these places yields important comparative insights. It also provides a set of lenses for rethinking agrarian reform.



Interstitial Spaces in Northwestern KwaZulu-Natal: The Asian Connection

I turn now to a very brief sketch of some key findings from my recent research into the forces at work in Northwestern KwaZulu-Natal, a sub-region containing well over a million people, most of whom are concentrated in large relocation townships linked to formerly "white" towns - Madadeni-Osizweni about 20km from Newcastle, and Ezakheni which is similarly located in relation to Ladysmith; there is another large relocation complex (Limehill-Ekuvukeni) about 40km from Ladysmith. Newcastle-Madadeni-Osizweni and Ladysmith-Ezakheni represent archtypical interstitial spaces; they are the joint product of industrial decentralization and forced removals, together with the subsequent migration of people - many of them women - from desperately poor rural areas.

Until May 1994 the sub-region was a bizarre apartheid patchwork, with bits of the KwaZulu bantustan spliced into Natal. Between 1960 and 1991, according to the censuses, the population increased from 412,000 to over a million. Yet during this period, the number of people recorded as living in those pieces of the sub-region designated as Natal fell from 343,000 (83%) of the total to 294,000 (29%) of the total, while KwaZulu's share of the sub-region's population rose from 69,000 to 717,000; the latter figure is, undoubtedly, an underestimate. These figures attest to the intensity of removals in this area, the cruelty of which is deeply etched into the landscape of places like Limehill. Historically the sub-region was, in fact, an area with relatively high levels of African freehold land; in the vicinity of Ladysmith there remain several large freehold communities that managed to resist removals.

Both Ladysmith and Newcastle originate from military outposts on what was the British colonial frontier in the mid-19th century, and are strategically located on transport routes mid-way between Johannesburg and Durban. Until the late 1960s, their economies were based primarily on coal mining, agriculture, and public utilities. Since the 1970s, both experienced a significant - if uneven - expansion of industry during a period of decline in the South African economy more generally. In 1960, industrial employment in Ladysmith and Newcastle combined was under 4,500. By 1991 it had grown to 38,000. Industrialization proceeded in three phases. From the post-war period until the late 1960s, large textile and clothing firms accounted for much of the industrial expansion. The second phase in the 1970s was the era of heavy industrialization; it culminated in a series of economic crises in the late 1970s and early 1980s in manufacturing as well as in mining and agriculture in the sub-region. The 1980s represents the heyday of state-sponsored industrial decentralization under the Regional Industrial Development Program (RIDP); during this period, Northwestern KwaZulu-Natal garned 29% of the RIDP-funded projects in the province, 33% of the jobs, and 25% of the capital investment.

These phases coincide with shifts in macro-economic conditions, as well as changes in national policy. Yet industrial trajectories cannot simply be read off these macro forces; in addition, they have been shaped in crucially important ways by locally-specific struggles and strategies, and intense place-based competition that goes back at least to the 1940s. Until the 1970s, political connections were the chief means by which local coalitions in Ladysmith and Newcastle tried to pull in industry. The 1980s saw the emergence of particularly aggressive marketing strategies; although these strategies were launched on the basis of resources dispensed by the nation state, they operated through non-local linkages very different from the earlier direct political connections. In Ladysmith, local officials forged a close relationship with regional authorities in the form of the KwaZulu Finance Corporation (KFC) and managed to lay claim to significant resources for an industrial estate in Ezakheni. When it became clear that the Ladysmith-KFC connection had monopolized most of the regional resources, Newcastle local officials reached directly into the global economy. They established connections in Asia (mainly Taiwan and Hong Kong), and lured approximately 65 industrialists to Newcastle with a combination of RIDP incentives and extremely cheap luxury houses.

The sharp decline in RIDP incentives after 1991 has certainly not produced the industrial collapse that many predicted. Data supplied by the KFC for the Ezakheni industrial estate suggest that, despite some contraction after 1991, there appears to have been remarkable stability in a period of general macro-economic deterioration in the early 1990s. An industrial survey that Alison Todes and I conducted in Newcastle in late 1994 revealed that aggregate industrial employment fell by about 18% between 1989 and 1994; however, the fall in employment has come about exclusively through the contraction of the four largest heavy industries (all South African owned); employment in clothing and other light industries (both Taiwanese and South African-owned) increased by about 15%. Although some Taiwanese firms closed down, a new wave of small industrialists has set up without incentives; most of them are former technicians who worked elsewhere in South Africa.

What is now emerging in Northwestern KwaZulu-Natal is a classically Taiwanese form of networked production, in which firms of different sizes have forged a variety of subcontracting links with one another, and are seeking to compete in global markets. In short, Taiwanese industrialists are recreating in the South African countryside a logic of accumulation and forms of production organization that are, on the face of it, very similar to those which drove rapid rural industrialization in Taiwan. Yet despite their evident dynamism, these networked forms of production are simultaneously extremely fragile. The source of fragility is not, as neoliberal critics of industrial decentralization would have it, that they have been artificially induced by incentives; rather it is because they generate intense labor conflict that has escalated in the 1990s.

On one level, the reasons for labor conflict are quite simple and straightforward - low wages and poor working conditions. Yet there are important insights to be gained from inquiring more closely into why forms of production that have produced spectacular growth in Taiwan and more recently in China are falling apart in South Africa. Three elements are, I suggest, particularly crucial: (1) gender relations and the composition of the predominantly female workforce; (2) the relationship between production and the conditions of social reproduction, in particular property rights and the conditions of access to land; and (3) the linkages (or lack thereof) between agriculture and industry.

The main thrust of my argument is as follows: The trajectory of industrial growth in Taiwan has been shaped in crucially important ways by redistributive land reform in the late 1940s. Agriculture-industry linkages at the level of the household constitute central elements of Taiwanese industrial growth and the character of flexibility in small-scale family firms. The logic of accumulation and labor mobilization of Taiwanese firms is predicated on a societal structure which, while tightly repressive and deeply oppressive of women, provides subsistence guarantees in the form of broadly-based access to land which underwrites the money wage. When Taiwanese industrialists - many of them straight out of the peasantry - came to South Africa, they encountered a rural workforce constituted through a particularly brutal process of dispossession. Further, workers in comparable industries in Asia are predominantly young, unmarried women from peasant households; their South African counterparts are typically older women with major responsibilities for children, who have often borne the brunt of dispossession. These sharp contrasts in the conditions of social reproduction are, I suggest, central to understanding the character and intensity of labor conflict in Taiwanese firms in South Africa.

At the same time, the future of interstitial spaces is not necessarily inscribed in their inauspicious beginnings. Ironically, these spaces created by apartheid may contain significant opportunities for large numbers of poor people - particularly women - to gain access to land and other productive resources in ways that go beyond welfare stop-gap measures. To appreciate these possibilities, one has to re-envision agrarian reform. Instead of being simply or primarily about agriculture and small farmers, agrarian reform needs to focus on creating conditions in which people can construct livelihoods in more effective and productive ways than is now possible.



Agrarian Reform and Non-Agricultural Linkages

Like so much else in the world today, the lenses for re-envisioning agrarian reform in South Africa are made in Asia. What is not often recognized is that multiple livelihoods have been characteristic of East Asian economies that launched their trajectories of rapid growth with large (and largely impoverished) rural populations. These particular forms of multiple livelihoods, predicated on broadly-based access to land, have in fact played a key role in shaping the relatively equitable distributional outcomes. These diversified modes of livelihood have taken shape in dramatically different macro-economic and political contexts - Taiwan and China, for example - and are organized in a variety of different ways. It is, nevertheless, possible to discern three common elements that have created the conditions for relatively equitable forms of multiple livelihoods: (1) land reforms that ensured widespread access to land and subsistence guarantees; (2) synergistic linkages between agriculture and non-agricultural activities; and (3) spatial proximity between agriculture, industry, and other non-agricultural activities.

Post-war land reforms in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea ensured that access to land has been highly equitable even though landholdings have typically been extremely small. In China, land reforms and the collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s have given way to decollectivization since the late 1970s. In the process of decollectivization, land within communes has typically been equally distributed among constituent households. In many cases, landholdings are miniscule and only a very small proportion of a household's livelihood typically comes from agriculture. Land does, nevertheless, perform the dual function of a productive asset and a source of social security.

Particularly in Taiwan and China, broadly-based access to land has been accompanied by a number of powerful dynamic linkages between agriculture and non-agriculture which have expanded income opportunities in local economies. The most obvious are direct production linkages, such as the industrial processing of agricultural products. Probably more important are consumption linkages, which arise when an increase in income in one sector generates demand for the products and services of other sectors. In different East Asian economies, land redistribution combined with increases in agricultural productivity have played a crucial role in expanding demand for non-agricultural goods and services.

Linkages also operate in the other direction. In some parts of China and Taiwan, rapid non-agricultural growth has taken place in close proximity to clusters of small-scale landholdings. Over the past decade in China, for example, most of the extraordinary industrial growth has come from small-scale enterprises owned and operated by local governments in densely-settled villages and towns. What makes these institutional innovations particularly compelling is that they combine collective ownership with market discipline. The bulk of profits of rural industries are controlled by local governments and disbursed within local circuits.

This spatial clustering of small landholdings and non-agricultural activities is a major key to the effective operation of multiple livelihoods. It is by no means automatic, however - in particular, small-farm based agricultural growth does not necessarily generate localized growth of non-agricultural activities. The Muda region of Malaysia, for example, remained relatively undiversified despite rapid agricultural growth on small and medium-sized farms. Instead of being retained and reinvested in local circuits as in parts of China, resources flowed out of the region. For poor small-farm households this meant ongoing dependence on long-distance migration which limited their capacity to consolidate and accumulate resources. Female-headed households unable to deploy labor to work in other areas were condemned to ongoing poverty.

The contrast between these spatially extended patterns of livelihood and the spatially clustered East Asian pattern is quite pertinent to the agrarian debate in South Africa. The small-farmer model of agrarian reform, which is designed to create small farmers for whom agriculture in the centrepiece of livelihood, is very likely to be spatially dispersed. First, since it is contingent on land becoming available through the market, aspiring small-farm households must be willing and able to relocate to what may well be quite remote regions. Second, even if small-farm agriculture does generate non-agricultural linkages, these are very likely to be non-local. The spatially dispersed character of the small farmer model is one of the chief reasons why it is unlikely to be a realistic option for large numbers of poor people - particularly women - who, even if they could get access to land, would continue to rely on multiple livelihoods.

East Asian experience suggests two key objectives of agrarian reform capable of supporting multiple livelihoods: widespread access to small plots of land, and close proximity to other sources of income. Even a very small but well-watered piece of land which can support intensive cultivation and which is close to other income opportunities, schools, and health facilities is likely to make much more sense to large numbers of poor families than becoming a farm household wherever land happens to become available. Spatial clustering is likely to be particularly important for women who, in addition to working for wages and other income, undertake vast amounts of unpaid labour - bearing and rearing children, housework, and care of the sick and elderly. Spatial proximity constitutes a sort of resource which cuts travel costs and makes possible the combination and sequencing of multiple activities.

While East Asian cases are useful in defining objectives of widespread access to land combined with spatially-clustered linkages between agricultural and non-agricultural activities, they also serve as a sharp reminder that the political conditions of access to resources - particularly land - reflect particular historical circumstances, and feed into historically specific dynamics. Land reforms in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea were spearheaded by the US military which was instrumental in removing agrarian elites; this in turn reconfigured the political and economic terrain, the (multiple) trajectories of growth, and their distributional outcomes. In an even more dramatic way, Chinese experience illustrates the centrality of historically-specific forces and trajectories.

In South Africa today, proposals for market-based land reform are just as much a reflection of political conditions inherited from the past. The possibilities for broadly-based access to land, as several observers have pointed out, will depend crucially on organization and pressure from dispossessed people - and that, in sharp contrast to conditions in urban areas, there seems to be a political vacuum. The question is not only whether and how this vacuum might be filled, but also where. Paradoxically, the interstitial spaces created by apartheid spatial engineering may in fact present the greatest opportunities.


Rethinking Agrarian Reform in South Africa

In South Africa today, the economic and political preconditions for agrarian reform which supports multiple livelihoods may exist in relatively densely settled sub-regions like Northwestern KwaZulu-Natal which are neither rural nor urban. The physical potential lies particularly in the buffer zones once designed to separate white towns and black townships, along with other nearby land.

These large, empty tracts of land would seem to present major opportunities for redistribution along East Asian lines. These areas are richly supplied with infrastructure, so that the costs of supplying water, electricity, transport, waste disposal and so forth are far lower than in more remote rural regions. The ecological viability of intensive cultivation would, of course, have to be investigated and may well be quite controversial. It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that since towns are typically close to water sources, at least part of these buffer zones and other nearby areas may be relatively easy to irrigate. There is ample evidence from Osizweni that people cultivate intensively on small plots when water is available. Probably about 50-60% of households in Osizweni grow vegetables for own consumption and for sale. The potential for expanding and diversifying this type of very small-scale part-time agriculture may in fact be quite considerable if well-watered land became available.

Buffer zones and adjacent land are not simply physical spaces that happen to be strategically located, well-resourced, and unused: they also exemplify new political spaces. In the context of local government restructuring, newly-formed Transitional Local Councils are redrawing boundaries to unify former white towns and black townships. In the process, buffer zones are becoming part of new political entities. Since large parts of these areas were owned by former white town councils, thousands of hectares will come under the jurisdiction of new local governments.

If they are not so already, buffer zones and adjacent land will very quickly become intensely contested spaces, and the locus of multiple competing claims and aspirations. Political mobilization combined with policy initiatives at multiple levels will be crucial in determining whether or not these areas form the basis of equitable growth based on democratic allocation of resources.

Agrarian reform to support multiple livelihoods depends first and foremost on broadly-based local political mobilization and organization around questions of land access and land use. Because it is situated within the context of democratic local government restructuring, this type of agrarian reform may be far more conducive to broadly-based political mobilization than the small farmer model.

It is also far more conducive to women's property rights. Indeed, women's active and collective involvement in exercising pressure for access to land may well be the single most important determinant of the success of multiple-livelihood agrarian reform. This in turn could have repercussions in more remote rural areas of the former banstustans where tribal authorities are attempting to maintain control over land allocation in ways which, unless challenged, will almost certainly continue to exclude women.

Local dynamics are the primary crucible in which these and other possibilities for democratic resource allocation and equitable growth will be tested, but they are not sufficient: supportive action at the regional and national levels is also vitally important. There is a pressing need for the Reconstruction and Development Programme to transcend conventional urban-rural categories, and focus on the possibilities for institutional innovation and mobilization in the interstices of the urban-rural divide.