Record Details

Joint venture Schemes in Limpopo Province and their outcomes on smallholder farmers livelihoods

MELSpace

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title Joint venture Schemes in Limpopo Province and their outcomes on smallholder farmers livelihoods
 
Creator Mapedza, Everisto
 
Contributor Van Koppen, Barbara
Sithole, Pinimidzai
Bourblanc, Magalie
 
Subject joint venture
 
Description Joint Venture schemes based on the floppy irrigation technology are being promoted in the post-
Apartheid South Africa's Limpopo Province. Access to land and water resources in South Africa are
largely viewed as a mechanism for re-dressing the Apartheid injustices. This research was part of a
broader applied research to help inform irrigation practise in the Limpopo Province. The research used
literature review, key informant interviews and a questionnaire survey. The overall research question
sought to understand how the Joint Venture Schemes had benefited the smallholder farmers. This paper
argues that the joint venture partnership created a new injustice. Firstly, the Joint Venture Scheme
design is fundamentally a bad idea which disempower farmers not only to water access but also land as
well. The choice of the ‘efficient’ floppy irrigation technology was made by the state and entailed that
land had to be managed as a single unit. In order to make more effective use of this highly sophisticated
new technology, the smallholder farmers also needed to go into a joint venture partnership with a white
commercial farmer. By virtue of signing the Joint Venture agreement the farmers were also forfeiting
their land and water rights to be used for crop production. The smallholder farmers lost access to their





water and land resources and were largely relegated to sharing profits e when they exist - with hardly





any skills development despite what was initially envisaged in the Joint Venture partnership. Secondly,











the implementation of the JVS has been skewed from the start which explains the bad results. This paper
further shows how the negative outcomes affected women in particular. As the smallholder farmers
argue the technological options chosen by the state have excluded both male and female farmers from
accessing and utilising their land and water resources in order to improve their livelihoods; it has
entrenched the role of the state and the private interests at the expense of the smallholder male and
female farmers in whose name the irrigation funding was justified. The paper concludes by offering
recommendations on how joint venture schemes can be genuinely participatory and meaningfully
address the rural livelihoods.
 
Date 2015-11-14
2016-02-01T21:42:22Z
2016-02-01T21:42:22Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier https://mel.cgiar.org/reporting/download/hash/Y5DTE6JJ
Everisto Mapedza, Barbara Van Koppen, Pinimidzai Sithole, Magalie Bourblanc. (14/11/2015). Joint venture Schemes in Limpopo Province and their outcomes on smallholder farmers livelihoods. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, pp. 1-7.
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11766/4220
Limited access
 
Language en
 
Rights CC-BY-NC-4.0
 
Format PDF
 
Publisher Elsevier
 
Source Physics and Chemistry of the Earth;(2015) Pagination 1,7