A contemporary approach in post-apartheid South Africa to shift the structural foundation of racial inequality and redress past injustices is land transfer, though land policies and associated operationalisation have fallen short of triggering the expected socioeconomic gains. Where land has been redistributed, it has neither contributed to the revitalization of smallholder agriculture, nor enhanced the living conditions of recipients. The failure of the land programme to meet official targets and public expectations may be tied to prevalent underutilization of the lands owing to lack of working capital, insufficient support services and unsuitable project design. There are two missing links in the transfer process: first, the lack of sustained focus, timely policy adjustment, resource mobilization and policy operationalization; second, inappropriate strategy to address agrarian dualism. The chapter concludes by suggesting that while land transfer is commendable, recipients should be actively involved in project construction and roll-out, provision of necessary support system to new entrants into the farming sector, continuous extension services to subsistence and commercial farmers, feasible farm planning and partitioning of large farm lands among households.

This chapter examines twentieth and twenty-first century US farmworker literature. It argues that US farmworker literature distinguishes itself from the Jeffersonian agrarianism dominant in literary and cultural representations of US farmers by not only exposing the systems of power and privilege through which farmworkers are exploited, but also positioning farmworkers as key conveyors of environmental knowledge. And it shows how farmworker epistemologies in US literature and culture offer a critical vantage point on both the industrial food system and the larger systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism upon which the industrial food system relies. The chapter considers Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as examples of farmworker literature that both address the conditions of exploitation facing farm laborers in the industrial food system, including economic and environmental violence, and foreground farmworkers’ environmental knowledge.