Article Crafting in the context of AIDS and rural poverty: a livelihood strategy with prospects

In South Africa, development initiatives in rural areas that have been directed at Africans have centred almost exclusively on agriculture. This legacy continues into current policy. The development component of land reform, made more explicit and forceful in the second term of the new democracy, has as its core the notion of successful emergent black farmers. The focus on agriculture persists despite the fact of advanced deagrarianisation (Bryceson 1996, Marcus et al 1996) and persistent, historically structured inequalities in land, labour and capital (Adams at al 1999, Mclntosh and Vaughan 1999, Marcus 1989, May 1998). Moreover the major component of the rural economy, commercial agriculture, makes a small contribution to the gross domestic product and is a declining source of occupation, with farm work accounting for less than ten per cent of those working in South Africa. Together, the general absence of small or micro agriculture, limited agricultural employment and widespread low wages in the sector means that relentless poverty affects about half the households and two-thirds of the rural population in South Africa (May 1998). In such a context, the stimulation of non-agricultural economic activity is essential to rural livelihoods. The inherited problems of rural social inequality and the failure of agriculturally focused development to provide livelihoods for the majority of the rural population are compounded by the AIDS pandemic. Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, is at the epicentre of what is a global epidemic. An estimated 13 million Africans have died in the two decades since the start of the epidemic and 23 million people or 70 per cent of all adults and children presently living with HIV are found in this regio