Sean Archer

Technology and Ecology in the Karoo: a Century of Windmills, Wire and Changing Farming Practice*

Windmills and wire fencing entered the farming practices of the north-eastern Karoo in the final decades of the nineteenth century. A new grazing system came into being comprising artificial water sources and camps in which sheep and other livestock ranged freely. By the late 1920s this had displaced the old shepherding-plus-kraaling arrangements. At the time, the coming of the new methods was predicted to raise stocking rates, improve veld cover and lessen soil erosion. This paper asks what the ecological consequences have been when viewed historically. Information is drawn from available sources, and the replies are summarised of current farmers and other land resource managers in the Sneeuberg in response to questions about the impact of the camp system. Recent debates about alternative models of rangeland ecology are surveyed as an essential preliminary to the construction of historical hypotheses. Finally, more far-reaching and demanding questions on environmental change in the Karoo are posed for future research work.

South Africa's industrial experience in perspective

Manufacturing industry is large absolutely as well as by comparison with other sectors and other countries. Sixty years of import‐replacement policies has produced a diversified structure, but in recent years disappointments have outweighed achievements in dimensions like job creation, capital intensity and the increasing resource cost of futher import substitution. That these difficulties are paralleled in Latin America is no solace, and it may be advisable to look instead at the ‘newly industrializing countries’ like South Korea for future policy guidance. Yet even a cursory examination raises serious doubts about the short‐run likelihood of South Africa successfully emulating these industrial exporters.

The International Literature on Skills Training and the Scope for South African Application

Abstract: This paper aims to introduce selected issues from the international literature on skills training into the South African policy forum. Reform of national strategies in skills production has characterised a number of industrial as well as certain developing economies in recent decades. Their experience is potentially valuable locally. The main lessons are that skills training resembles education in being partly a public good. The acquisition of skills parallels the acquisition of knowledge. Training opportunities do have to be rationed by some mechanism, either through the market or by rules internal to an organisation engaged in training, but the content of the competency learned is a form of knowledge. More competency with economic value that is acquired by one person does not mean less of it is available for acquisition by another. Nor, secondly, can non-payers be wholly excluded from the benefits of training financed by others. For example, there are separate gains for fellow workers, for employers poaching trained workers, and for investors in new technology. So certain economic decision-takers can free-ride on such investments in human capital. As classic examples of market failure they make clear that simple allocation through a market is not at all adequate for a national system of skills training. The second lesson is that problems of information, incentives and market power preclude the emergence of a training equilibrium in which individual workers and employers pursue their interests successfully and therefore efficiently. In practice most training takes place on the job, where it is difficult for an outside agency like the state to influence investment decisions directly. Sensible roles for the state are to supply needed information, to put in place positive and negative incentives where needed, to provide accreditation that is credible in the market, to set up a framework of regulation that fosters informational transparency and constrains skills poaching, and to invest in high quality prior education for trainees flowing into occupational markets. An additional state function is to provide workable policy devices like ‘temporary migration programmes’ that enable active skilled labour recruitment from source countries. International precedents exist that show the way in a number of these expedients.

Reaction, reform and revision in the dark south

John Barratt, Simon Brand, David Collier, Kurt Glaser (eds.), Accelerated Development in Southern Africa (London: Macmian, 1974. pp. xiv + 706. £7). Adrian Leftwich (ed.), South Africa: economic growth and political change, with comparative studies of Chile, Sri Lanka and Malaysia (London: Allison and Busby, 1974. pp. viii + 360. £8).

The Insurgent Pedagogues: Bowles and Gintis In The Classroom

Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, 340 pp. R7,20 (paperback).