Conference Agenda

The crisis of social reproduction invites us to rethink the role of land beyond the narrow capitalist agricultural productivity framework. It necessitates that we consider how the survival of people who are ‘surplus’ to the needs of capital happens. Drawing on 76 in depth interviews, 9 focus group discussions, 32 household surveys and 25 life history interviews with former labour tenants in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, the paper shows that for people to socially reproduce themselves, land is central. They need and use land to establish homesteads without which social reproduction would not be possible, for subsistence crop production, petty commodity production, livestock grazing, petty trading and harvesting of natural resources. They also need and use land to express notions of belonging and dignity and for cultural reproduction. I argue that the availability of land and gendered labour, and the ways in which land is managed and governed through socially embedded tenure arrangements, and cultural reproduction through traditional ceremonies and rituals, facilitate the social reproduction of what I call ‘the landed surplus population. This paper contributes to debates on the centrality of land in social reproduction.

Women often lack access to agricultural technologies, as well as to the resources needed to adopt them, such as agricultural land, equipment, and inputs as well as technical information. Agricultural development projects are working to reach gender equality and empower women so they can take full advantage of agricultural technologies. However, little is known about interventions, or the specific mechanisms of the interventions work to help women access the resources for adopting technologies. To complicate matters further, it is not usually individual women (or men) making agricultural technology adoption decisions; these decisions are made at a farm-household level and we know relatively little about how these decisions are made or by whom they are made. This paper seeks to address these issues by exploring intra-household gender dynamics associated with adoption of a new barley variety. We find a positive correlation between households that adopt agricultural technologies and those in which women participate in decision-making processes as well as those in which women receive information. These findings show the importance of women’s active participation in agricultural development projects.

Wage work, or earning an independent income, has the potential to increase women’s bargaining power within the household, such as by improving their fall-back positions and/or raising the valuation of their contributions (Agarwal, 1997). For women farmworkers I interviewed in Western Cape (South Africa), this agency is highly constrained in contexts of extreme deprivation, inadequate access to different jobs and/or skills training, geographic isolation, limited social networks, and restrictive social norms and expectations (Andrews, 2022; Claasen & Lemke, 2019; Louw, 2022; WFP, 2020). In Western Cape (and broader South Africa), the absence of a job-rich rural economy, a casualizing farm workforce, low educational achievement (most of the interviewees having not completed secondary schooling), and a high-risk environment limits livelihood options for landless and/or tenure-insecure farmworkers (du Toit, 2004; Kruger et al., 2006; Mkhize, 2012). Women farmworkers’ lack of tenure and/or financial security, coupled with their reproductive role (Moser, 1989), influence the choices they (are able to) make. In such a context, whether or not to work is not always a ‘free’ choice. Rather, it is a choice made under constraints and needs like starvation, shelter, physical and job insecurities, and familial obligations. Nevertheless, examining the meaningfulness of that choice can better inform us if and how the decision to work reflects agency. An understanding of meaningful choice assumes that a woman’s decision to work—the choice analyzed here—may not directly reflect her agency (Chang et al., 2020; Duflo, 2012; Heath & Jayachandran, 2016; Weidel, 2018).

This paper is based on a chapter of my doctoral thesis. I use Amartya Sen's capability approach to qualitatively conceptualize individual agency by considering one aspect of women farmworkers' choice processes: their identities. I focus on one dimension of agency—decisions to work—and examine the meaningfulness of this choice to the respondents. I then explore how people’s identities—specifically the meanings they attach to those identities—condition their individual agency (i.e. decision to work). A core argument in this paper is that relational elements are important to individuals' agency enactments. The overwhelming, and often singular, way of categorizing people who work on commercial farms in South Africa—as farmworkers—has historical and racial dimensions. This blanket categorization omits many other identities that these individuals hold and negotiate. Unpacking these different identities better illustrates the motivations that underline people’s decisions to work and that add meaning to their choices.