EDITORS: The Review of African Political Economy Chris Allen and Jan Burgess (ROAPE) is published quarterly by Carfax Publishing Company for the ROAPE international collective. Now 27 years old, BOOK REVIEWS: ROAPE is a fully refereed journal covering all Ray Bush, Roy Love and Morris Szeftel aspects of African political economy. ROAPE has always involved the readership in shaping the journal's coverage, welcoming contributions EDITORIAL WORKING GROUP: from grass roots organisations, women's Chris Allen, Carolyn Baylies, Lynne Brydon, organisations, trade unions and political groups. Janet Bujra, Jan Burgess, Ray Bush, Carolyne The journal is unique in the comprehensiveness Dennis, Anita Franklin, Graham Harrison, of its bibliographic referencing, information Jon Knox, Roy Love, Giles Mohan, Colin monitoring, statistical documentation and Murray, Mike Powell, Marcus Power, David coverage of work-in-progress. 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Consent Gloria Thomas-Emeagwali (Central to copy for general distribution, for promotion, Connecticut), Carol Thompson (Arizona); for creating new work, or for resale must be UK: A. M. Babu (1924-1996), Lionel Cliffe, specifically obtained in writing from ROAPE Basil Davidson, Caroline Ifeka, Raufu Mustafa, Publications Ltd. Phil O'Keefe, Peter Lawrence, S. Riley (1949-1998), Pepe Roberts and Kevin ISSN 0305-6244 Watkins. ©2000 ROAPE Publications Ltd Review of African Political Economy No.84:173-180 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2000 ISSN 0305-6244 Commentary:The Struggle for Land Ray Bush & Morris Szeftel The main focus of this issue is the importance of land in Africa and, particularly, of struggles over access to land and land rights. The subject raises the recurrent theme of the relationship between town and country but also, more pressingly, crucial issues of class conflict and struggle. It also raises more general questions about the character of a country's development strategy, the balance struck between export growth and self- provisioning and, ultimately, what access to the land is to be afforded for rural dwellers. The issue of land is thus a political one, a matter of who sets the political agenda and what is permitted on that agenda. In different ways, a number of contributions offer insights into the likely consequences of persistent intervention by international financial agencies and by petty bourgeois politicians and their cronies who seek land as personal property for their own aggrandisement. The international financial agencies, the World Bank and USAID for example, have promoted the importance of individual title, essentially the privatisation of tenure and even of ownership, for many years. While some bank officials, notably in South Africa and Zimbabwe have recognised the important flexibility of African indigenous tenure there has continued to be a prevailing view that incentives for greater productivity follow from privatisation of tenure (Cleaver & Schreiber, 1994). USAID in Egypt is currently promoting the importance of extending titles to land as a precondition for - and precursor to - an improved land market. Yet as the articles in this volume indicate there are other issues at stake when considering rural development, issues which are being neglected. These include security of access to rural work and markets, the development of rural infrastructure, affordable production inputs and rural growth which need to run alongside, rather than be offered as some vague future by-product of, economic reform and changes in tenure. The emphasis on title and tenure tends also to oversimplify or ignore local traditions of work and the prior existence of markets in land. Most alarmingly, it also accelerates processes of rural social differentiation and class formation in which landless and female-headed households and the dispossessed are marginalised. Egypt has just experienced a (largely unreported) land reform that rescinded the security of tenure given to rural tenants under Nasser in the 1950s. Law 96 of 1992, implemented after a 5 year transition period in October 1997, promotes the application of market land values and annual rents and ends rights in perpetuity previously enjoyed by the country's one million tenants and their families (possibly 10 per cent of the population). By losing their security of tenure, those tenants unable to pay large increases in rent (often as much as 400 per cent) have been forced to leave the land. This has produced a substantial shift in economic power back to what might become a reinvigorated 'pasha' class of landowners. It is the outcome of a long struggle. President Sadat had tried to abandon this element of Nasser's legacy in the countryside as part of his 'corrective revolution' - which turned Egypt away from any semblance of a socialist economy in the '70s. It was only in 1991 however, 174 Review of African Political Economy strengthened by support from the World Bank and USAID, that President Mubarak used the parliament (dominated by landowning interests) to transform social relations in the countryside. The process of dispossession has been characterised by considerable hardship and struggle, as illustrated in the article by Bush. The Land Center for Human Rights in Cairo estimates that, from 1997 to 1999, there were around 87 deaths, 545 injuries and 798 arrests as a result of struggles over the implementation of Law 96. One of the consequences of the Act has been the re- politicisation of the land question, particularly along class lines. Land owners (including, it seems, the family of the Minister of Agriculture and Deputy Prime Minister, Yusuf Wali) have used the legislation to contest access to land that was not part of earlier tenancy agreements, including religiously endowed land, land reform and alluvial land. The challenge being posed in much of Africa to people's rights in land, and to the general social and economic rights of rural people, is also explored by Cliffe in his examination of three key dimensions of the land reform programme in South Africa - land redistribution, land restitution and land tenure reform. Cliffe assesses the first five years of reform, documenting its aims and examining the extent to which the draft Land Rights Bill of 1999 addresses policy shortcomings in the policies introduced after 1994. This includes proposals to accelerate the redistribution of white-owned commercial farms, which set a target of 15 per cent of that land to be placed in the hands of black commercial farmers (of varying size) over the first five years of the new decade. In similar vein, Rock examines proposals and legislation (yet to be implemented) to change tenure rights and consolidate production units in Eritrea. Her study raises questions about the extent to which the plans are based on a realistic assessment of local practices and needs and their consequent prospects for implementation. The problem of extending social, political and land rights to farm workers in Zimbabwe's commercial farming sector is the focus of the article by Moyo, Rutherford and Amanor-Wilks. Given the present turmoil on the white-owned farms - and the violence meted out to the workers on them - their paper could not be more timely. Their analysis explores the difficulties which land redistribution in Zimbabwe will present for farm workers if their interests are not made part of the agenda of change. It argues for an end to traditional indifference to the issue and calls for a holistic approach to redistribution and reform, one which goes well beyond the strategies advanced so far - and is in marked contrast to the inadequacy of the positions taken so far by Zimbabwean nationalists and foreign donors alike. The authors argue cogently that a thorough reappraisal of