The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Glenn Ashton -
Reams have been written about corporate land acquisitions around the world - land grabs, if you will. The hard reality is that there is a sound business case to be made for commercial interests to aggressively attempt to control the very foundation of the food chain, the land itself.
Through direct control of suitable land it is possible not only to control food production but also to manage whatever else happens on, around and with the land. This extends further than simply the corporate...
Richard Pithouse -
Urban land is acutely contested in contemporary South Africa. There are regular land occupations, some taking the form of quiet encroachment and some taking the form of overtly political acts. At the same time most municipalities have armed units that, often acting violently, and more or less invariably acting illegally, try to sustain the duopoly of the state and the market over the allocation and zoning of urban land. When land occupations are presented as simple acts of criminality,...
Richard Pithouse -
In 1652, the year that Jan van Riebeck first stepped on to these shores, Gerrad Winstanley, an English radical, published a pamphlet called The Law of Freedom in a Platform. Three years earlier he had led a land occupation on St. George's Hill in Surrey. The occupation had aimed, against the growing enclosure of common lands for private profit to insist that “the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again”. It was quickly and violently crushed.
The pamphlet that Winstanley published...
Glenn Ashton -
Land ownership is a prickly problem in South Africa, which has not yet been properly addressed, despite its prioritisation in 1994. The primary focus on land redistribution has understandably, but perhaps unwisely, centred on the issue of agricultural land holdings. Given increased rates of urbanisation, it can be argued that urban land tenure demands similar, if not higher levels of attention.
Land is at the foundation of conventional - and informal - economic wealth, in both developed...
Maude Barlow -
Recently, I had the honour of speaking at a fundraiser for the victims of the famine in the Horn of Africa, organized by local health-care providers Dr. Farook Hossenbux and his nurse and partner Geri Hossenbux. Speakers included a representative from Doctors Without Borders, local groups raising money for the cause and local artists. Several mentioned the phenomenon of "donor fatigue" in this case and puzzled about why it was so hard to raise money for a crisis threatening as many...
Glenn Ashton -
South Africa's agricultural landscape remains essentially unchanged. Landed white farmers pursue an industrial farming model that relies on high external inputs. Farm ownership patterns have changed little, despite continual promises. Food security remains unresolved. Significant sectors of our people, particularly women and children, remain under or malnourished. To top it off, the ecological impacts of our farming – soil erosion, high water use and abstraction, overuse of chemicals,...
