Andries du Toit

Integrating Poverty and Environmental Concerns into Value-Chain Analysis: A Conceptual Framework

Many policy prescriptions emphasise poverty reduction through closer integration of poor people or areas with global markets. Global value chain (GVC) studies reveal how firms and farms in developing countries are upgraded by being integrated in global markets, but few explicitly document the impact on poverty, gender and the environment, or conversely, how value chain restructuring is in turn mediated by local history, social relations and environmental factors. This article develops a conceptual framework that can help overcome the shortcomings in ‘standalone’ value-chain, livelihood and environmental analyses by integrating the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects of value chains that together affect poverty and sustainability.

Adverse Incorporation, Social Exclusion and Chronic Poverty

Poverty studies frequently fail to address the underlying processes that produce and reproduce poverty over time, preferring instead a descriptive focus on its correlates and characteristics. In this chapter, it is suggested that a much closer interrogation of the linkages between the state of chronic poverty and the processes of adverse incorporation and/or social exclusion that trap people in poverty is necessary. It is also proposed that these concepts can significantly advance current understandings of chronic poverty because they compel taking issues of causality seriously and relate these directly to social structures, relations, and processes. In particular, they force the examination of the multidimensional, political, and historical nature of persistent poverty.

The micro‐politics of paternalism: the discourses of management and resistance on South African fruit and wine farms

An analysis of the discourse of wine‐farm workers and owners in the Western Cape shows how paternalist discourse marginalises and excludes workers’ voices —but it also shows how workers can challenge the employers’ power. Traditional paternalism is distinguished by an ‘organic’ conception of the farm as a family, with the farmer occupying, a central position of unchallengeable authority. Today, however, a movement for rural reform is bringing about radical changes informing practice. These changes make authority less centralised and more impersonal. They ultimately bring about a greater degree of worker participation in middle management structures. But they also bring about a vast proliferation of internal contradictions and dislocations within management practice: reform can often exacerbate tensions on the farm. These internal crises offer an opportunity for farm worker unions to get a foothold on the farms, and to build institutions that recognise workers’ independent right to speak. These unions, how...

Globalizing Ethics: Social Technologies of Private Regulation and the South African Wine Industry

This paper discusses of some key issues arising from South African experience of the UK-based Ethical Trading Initiative’s (ETI) pilot project in the monitoring of compliance codes of conduct for product sourcing. The paper argues that the experience of ‘local stakeholder participation’ in the ETI’s pilot project in the South African wine industry raises serious questions about the appropriateness and efficacy of ‘ethical sourcing’ as a vehicle for creative global–local engagement. It explores key elements of the globalizing ‘technologies of ethics’ deployed by projects like the ETI, and argues that these may simply normalize and regularize power relations in trade between North and South. These limitations are particularly serious in light of the course of labour market restructuring in South Africa, which has reshaped agricultural employment in ways that limit the ability of employment standards to address real difficulties faced by agricultural workers. This does not render ‘ethical sourcing’ irrelevant, nor does it mean that it can be read as simply securing retailer interests. It does mean, however, that a key question facing ‘Southern’ organizations and their allies is how to increase the scope for engagement and contestation around the implementation of such initiatives.

Urban poverty in Cape Town

This paper describes key findings of a household livelihood survey conducted in impoverished African settlements in Cape Town, one of Africa’s wealthiest cities. Poverty in these areas is strongly shaped by the history of the Eastern Cape’s adverse spatial incorporation into the South African economy. Migrants from the rural areas are highly dependent on and integrated into the increasingly monetized economy - but are simultaneously marginalized and adversely incorporated within it. Survey findings show the costs and implications of this failure of the formal economy to provide adequate livelihoods. While many eke out a living in a vital yet marginal informal economy, these strategies are thoroughly linked to and dependent on the income that can be secured through participation in the formal job market. Those who are unable to find a foothold in the urban economy are highly vulnerable and are at risk of being confined to long-term poverty traps.

Myths of Globalisation: Private Regulation and Farm Worker Livelihoods on Western Cape Farms

Andries du Toit and Joachim Ewert look at worker livelihoods on wine farms in the Western Cape, arguing that sustainable livelihoods for farm workers are better served by policies rooted in an understanding of the social dynamics of change on farms.

Farm Workers and the 'Agrarian Question'

The poorest, most insecure and the least visible of South Africas black workers are those who live and work on its white‐owned farms. They have been oddly peripheral to the current land debate, partly due to the technocratic nature of the discourse of ‘development’ which has foreclosed consideration of the irreducibly political nature of local power relations. Farms are not mere units of production: they are structured by paternalist discourses — practices that weave power relations into the very fabric of social identity and daily life. Legal reform creates a space for contesting these power relations. This article explores some of the issues they face and tries to link these to larger questions of transformation.

In Search of South Africa's Second Economy: Chronic Poverty, Economic Marginalisation and Adverse Incorporation in Mt. Frere and Khayelitsha

Since 2003, South African policy discourse about persistent poverty has been dominated by the notion that poor people stay poor because they are trapped in a ‘second economy’, disconnected from the mainstream ‘first world economy.’ This paper considers the adequacy of this notion in the light of research conducted in 2002 and 2005-2006 in Mount Frere in the rural Eastern Cape, and in Cape Town’s African suburbs. It argues that a process of simultaneous monetisation, de-agrarianisation and de-industrialisation has created a heavy reliance on a formal sector in which employment is becoming increasingly elusive and fragile. Fieldwork suggested high levels of economic integration, corporate penetration and monetisation even in the remote rural Eastern Cape. Rather than being structurally disconnected from the ‘formal economy,’ formal and informal, ‘mainstream’ and marginal activities are often thoroughly interdependent, supplementing or subsidising one another in complex ways. The dynamics of these diverge significantly from those imagined both in ‘second economy’ discourse and in ‘SMME’ policy. Instead of imagining a separate economic realm, ‘structurally disconnected’ from the ‘first economy,’ it is more helpful to grasp that the South African economy is both unitary and heterogeneous, and that people’s prospects are determined by the specific ways in which their activities are caught up in the complex networks and circuits of social and economic power. Rather than ‘bringing people into’ the mainstream economy policymakers would do better to strengthen existing measures to reduce vulnerability, and to consider ways of counteracting disadvantageous power relations within which they are caught, and supporting the livelihood strategies that are found at the margins of the formal economy.

The Political Economy of Social Capital: Chronic Poverty, Remoteness and Gender in the Rural Eastern Cape

This paper uses two case studies drawn from in-depth ethnographic research in South Africas Eastern Cape to interrogate and problematise the often simplistic or reductive ways in which the concept of social capital is used in debates about development and poverty alleviation. It argues that if the concept is to be useful at all, it needs to be used in ways that are sensitive to the fact that social capital inheres in social relations; that these social relations cannot be understood separately from the meaning-giving practices and discourses with which they are entangled; that the analysis of social capital requires an agent-centred approach that is alive to the way in which it is used, transformed, created, made and remade; and that such an analysis furthermore needs to be alive to the nature of power relations both on the micro-level and the macro-level of political economy. The analysis of social capital therefore should be linked to a careful account of the practices, networks, systems and processes that empower some and enable them to climb out of poverty, but which also marginalise and trap others in poverty that is deep-seated and chronic.

The government of poverty and the arts of survival: mobile and recombinant strategies at the margins of the South African economy.

The paper is concerned with marginal populations affected by the ‘truncated agrarian transitions’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: people displaced out of land-based employment without reasonable prospects for accumulation in the non-farm economy. It analyses the forms of economic agency of people living in the migrant routes and networks connecting the shantytowns of Cape Town and the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa. It describes the artful and hybrid nature of their livelihood strategies – strategies that involve the integration from ‘below’ of urban and rural spaces, formal and informal income, and which simultaneously take shape outside the regulatory spaces conferred by the state, and make use of the rights and opportunities created by law and formality. Far from being reduced to the ‘outcast’ condition of ‘bare life’, marginalized and poor people in South Africa pursue inventive strategies on uneven terrain, cutting across the dichotomies of official discourse and teleological analysis. This allows a more nuanced analysis of the nature and specificity of the agrarian transition in South Africa.