Changing Livelihoods in Rural Eastern Cape, South Africa (2002–2016): Diminishing Employment and Expanding Social Protection

Abstract

Despite long-standing patterns of agrarian change in South and Southern Africa, rural locales remain home to millions of people, characterised by widespread poverty and vulnerability. This is evident in South Africa's former 'homelands', the site where this study examined changes in rural livelihoods over a 14-year period. Detailed survey data (collected in 2002 and 2016) from two villages in the Pondoland region of Eastern Cape province, and augmented by in-depth fieldwork, are analysed to explore the drivers of contemporary livelihood change. Key livelihood activities are examined, namely paid employment, social grant receipt, horticulture and livestock production, marine-resource and firewood harvesting. So too are changes within, and between, these diverse livelihood activities over time. Both monetised (income-earning) activities, and 'unremunerated' or unmonetised activities (for example, subsistence agriculture or marine-resource harvesting) are measured, aggregated and compared, in order to consider the drivers, consequences and prospective future trajectories of livelihood change. Key findings for impoverished households in the villages are that waged work has decreased significantly, while expanding social welfare provision has prevented plunges into deeper poverty. Agriculture and marine-resource harvesting remain dynamic, albeit unevenly engaged in by villagers. Amid these larger patterns, local-level variations are evident, with discrepant employment and agricultural production patterns across villages. The role of the state is ambiguous, being both a restrictor and enabler of local livelihoods. As jobs and other livelihood opportunities diminish, the villagers express frustration with the state, but remain simultaneously heavily reliant on state fiscal transfers, through grants and public employment schemes. The findings speak not only to the dynamics of rural livelihoods in South Africa's former homelands; they also point to changes in rural dwellers' livelihoods, within contexts of agrarian change, rural

Declines in Livestock Numbers Accompany Cropping Deagrarianisation Processes in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

“…The Eastern Cape was selected for this study because it has a large smallholder farming sector operating on communal lands and because deagrarianisation processes are well advanced [6,23,24]. Spanning 169,580 km 2 , the Eastern Cape is the second-largest province in South Africa, which underpins its biophysical heterogeneity.…”

“…Despite these concerns about food security, deagrarianisation processes are well advanced in the communal land areas of South Africa [6,7,22], particularly in the Eastern Cape [6,23,24], which is the poorest province in South Africa. Of the 17 empirical studies summarised by Shackleton et al [6], 15 showed a net decline in the area of fields cultivated over the study period.…”

“…Of the 17 empirical studies summarised by Shackleton et al [6], 15 showed a net decline in the area of fields cultivated over the study period. A wide variety and complex mix of social, economic and environmental drivers have been identified by previous researchers across different sites, including loss of family labour due to the introduction of compulsory schooling from the mid-1990s and significant migration to urban centres, insufficient funds to fence fields or hire a herder to keep raiding livestock away, death or theft of cattle required for ploughing, changing aspirations of the youth making many disinterested in farming as a future, and government social grant payments to poor households allegedly decreasing reliance on own household food production, to mention a few [23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…This decline in cattle numbers, therefore, compromised the ability of many households to plough fields, eventually leading to them abandoning the cultivation of fields. Much of the abandonment of field cultivation occurred during the late-1900s and early 2020s, soon after the political transition in the country and the demise of the cattle dipping programme [24,25], although it is ongoing. Government efforts at providing tractors for ploughing have been unsuccessful for a number of reasons, including not being able to work on steep terrain, not being able to accommodate peak demand at the onset of the rainy season and hijacking of the tractor services by local elites [30].…”

Barriers to scaling sustainable land and water management in Uganda: a cross-scale archetype approach

“…However, with better access to market, farmers might also opt for diversified household strategies to compensate the risk of low agricultural productivity with off-farm income (Ellis 1998, Ellis andFreeman 2004). These dynamics, here captured by the "risk aversion" cognitive archetype, represent an underlying factor across all spatial archetypes in Uganda, and also found in other African contexts (Hajdu et al 2020). This type of farmer's choice might also prove a resilient strategy for local communities (Ellis 1998), although reduced investment in agriculture might lead to land abandonment and further land degradation.…”