The incidence of violent crime on farms and smallholdings in South Africa is a cause of great concern to both the farming community and South Africans in general. The seriousness of continued attacks against the farming community in South Africa, and the urgency of confronting the issue, led former president Nelson Mandela to convene a rural safety summit in October 1998 to formulate a comprehensive strategy to deal with the problem.

The summit aimed at reaching consensus around a process to deal with the issue of attacks against farms and smallholdings, as well as more general issues of rural insecurity. The summit also aimed to strengthen existing strategies dealing with rural crime.

One of the resolutions passed during the summit was to conduct research on the probable causes and motives for attacks on the farming community, and the effectiveness of the rural protection plan. The rural safety task team requested the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) to conduct such research in the Wierdabrug, Piet Retief and KwaZulu-Natal Midlands areas.

The research was made possible by the secretariat for safety and security and the Agri Securitas trust fund that financed the research. The South African Police Service (SAPS) and the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) provided in-kind support. The rural safety task team is grateful to all involved for making the research project possible.

The results of the research project, as contained in this monograph, will assist the security forces, agricultural organisations and farmers and smallholders to understand the phenomenon of attacks on farms and smallholdings. The research results will also enable the security forces to improve weaknesses in the rural protection plan.

Further research is planned in other parts of the country where the incidence of attacks against farms and smallholdings is high. This will further inform the security forces’ strategic and operational response to this reprehensible form of crime ravaging the country’s rural communities.

The research results in the form of this monograph will be distributed to all relevant roleplayers involved in the rural protection plan, such as the SAPS, the SANDF, agricultural organisations, farmers, business people and academics.

Lt-Col H J Boshoff
RURAL SAFETY TASK TEAM