Issues surrounding labour tenancy in South Africa are controversial and complex. The issue is controversial in that that it currently reflects a struggle over access to land and tenure security that spans more than a century. The controversy surrounding labour tenancy derives from the fact that the role players within this scenario often hold widely differentiated perceptions about each other’s rights, duties and respective power relationships.

Various multilateral organisations, for instance the World Bank, the Food and Agricultural Organisation have been at the forefront of the different programmes designed to enhance tenure security of landholders as the basis for long-term agricultural development. This has been the case especially in parts of the world where customary systems of tenure are predominant. Wily argues that ‘so little of sub-Saharan Africa is subject to formal entitlements as legally recognised private properties’.

The report provides a brief history of farm labour in South Africa tracing its roots in slavery and colonial dispossession through to the emergence of state supported commercial agriculture and the subsequent deregulation of the agricultural sector. This is with a view to contextualising the examination of tenure security and identifying the impacts on people living and working on land owned by others. The report provides a scan of the legal reforms and measures instituted in the first decade of democracy in order to reverse the injustices of the past.

Local level, collective small-scale farming projects in the Kat River Valley, like elsewhere, have proven difficult to sustain.  Various factors from macro-level policies to local level social and political dynamics were found to hinder or block the success of such projects.  Some of the most challenging factors relate to history and path dependency, prevailing neoliberal agricultural policies and discourses, narrow markets, internal conflicts, lack of local capacity and unclear and insecure land tenure.