Poverty and production in a rural microcosm: Hanover, Cape

Opening Paragraph In the popular consciousness, South African poverty is a phenomenon of the homeland or urban township and ghetto, more rarely of rural areas in the core economy. Such a perspective is determined largely by the higher visibility of the poor in the former localities in the recent past, for reasons of geography and political sensitivity. This study aimed to redress the balance, starting from two broad premises: first, that the technical and organisational changes in production and the growth of surplus labour observable in Hanover on a microscale are representative of secular trends in commercialised agriculture in the Karoo region as a whole; and, second, that the causes of poverty generation in that region cannot be satisfactorily examined in isolation from the wider political and economic processes within which they are embedded.