Setting the agenda: a critique of the World Bank's rural restructuring programme for South Africa

Abstract

This article offers a critique of the presuppositions of the recommendations put forward in the World Bank's ‘Options for Land Reform and Rural Restructuring in South Africa’ 1993. It examines the documents which informed the proposals; the adequacy of their accounts of the experiences, notably of land reforms in Kenya, on which they draw; the strength of their evidence and arguments, particularly regarding agricultural performance and policies; and the feasibility and purposes of their proposals for land redistribution. It argues that the World Bank proposals rest on misleading intellectual foundations. The World Bank's analyses regarding the relative (in)efficiency of large‐scale farming in South Africa with respect to scale of production, factor productivity and prices are not supported by much of the evidence they cite. Their proposals revived aspects of the thinking behind the Swynnerton and Tomlinson reports of the 1950s. Government programmes to develop black farmers in South Africa in the late 1980s followed the approach of the World Bank's unsuccessful agricultural development projects elsewhere in Africa. The ‘surprisingly small’ cost of the World Bank's land reform proposals depend on unrealistic assumptions ‐and proved to be well beyond the resources available to the new government.