Joining the ranks of older foreign-funded communist and pro-land invasion activists like Ndifuna Ukwazi, Reclaim the City and SERI, Via Campesina has now laid their beachhead in the Cape.

Self-styled “peasant activists”, Christina van Wyk and Kelly-Jane Marmaan from Cape Town recently addressed a global conference in Bogotá, Colombia, organized by La Via Campesina, attacking continued ownership of farmland by white people.

This marks the beginning of a foothold of a massive international communist movement started in Belgium in 1993, which has involved itself in third-world land disputes for three decades.

It is run by Jesuit-educated French EU politician and agricultural unionist José Bové, Zimbabwean agricultural activist Elizabeth Mpofu, and communist philosopher Guy Kastler.

The group receives extensive support from multiple UN organisations, and advocate for mass subsidised small-scale farming by unskilled peasants protected with price controls and established through expropriation.

The South African activists, part of the Right to Agrarian Reform for Food Sovereignty Campaign (FSC), a subsidiary of the international communist organisation, wish to see the farmland in South Africa distributed to subsistence farms and communal enterprises run by non-whites.

The conference discusses the complex history of agrarian reform in Colombia, marked by a 25 year armed conflict between communist guerillas and the peace agreement struck with the Colombian government.

They made the argument that if South Africa wishes to avoid mass violence and slaughter, they should give into their demands.

Their focus is on the disproportionate influence of commercial farmers and the retail sector on food prices in South Africa, and in ignorance of the demands of modern infrastructure and comparable agrarian reforms projects elsewhere, demand expropriation and redistribution to smallholders.

They place a heavy emphasis on female property ownership over male ownership.

The activists stress the importance of popularizing the concept they use for their own concept of “food sovereignty” (meaning de-mechanisation, redistribution, organic farming, price-controls and subsidisation) in South Africa.

While this idea sells itself as a way to achieve food security, every instance of such policies implemented on a national scale in Africa have resulted in mass famine, from Rwanda to Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Redistribution itself destroys the capital and skills foundation for operating complex modern farming enterprises, but reducing farming to smallholdings removes the economy of scale required to compete on the global market, or to produce food at a lower price.

While many point to East Asian countries like Korea and Japan as successful land reform projects, these were transfers of land from absentee landlords to tenured farmers already practicing their trade for generations.

Here, the plan is to deprive generational farmers of their land and trade, and hand their property over to the least educated or capable in the economy.

To compensate for the shortages of food that inevitably ensue, many turn to imports, though La Via Campesina desires tariffs to prevent this.

The subsequent rise in food prices are to be combated with price controls, which  impose a heavy burden on retailers and producers, and often result in the drying up of supply chains as sellers struggle to meet overheads.

To shore up the supply side, they insist on creating dependency on subsidies, meaning that no producer has any incentive to produce anything or maintain responsible financial practices, and becomes a black hole for public finances.

This is a total distillation of the entire trajectory of Zimbabwe’s horrendous and famine-inducing land reform scheme into a single policy programme.

The real question is what kind of influence these campaigners will have in the Cape. It is hard to say at this point, though the sympathies with bloodthirsty communist militia in Colombia suggest that abiding by the law is not a priority.

The funding for this massive organisation is extremely opaque. No indication of their donors can be found on their website, though the Agroecology Fund has supported them to some extent. The Agroecology fund itself appears to be just as opaque, with some donors, like IKEA, boasting of supporting them to the tune of millions of Euros, but not counted or named on their website.

This appears to be part of the vast and unaccountable network of NGOs receiving tax-deductable donations from tax-avoidant businesses eager to exploit loopholes in wealthy countries’ tax systems.

This absence of financial transparency may not point so much to a conspiratorial aspect as a systemic exploit for ideologically-driven parasites.

Whatever their deeper organisational nature, an outfit with deep enough pockets to operate in over 80 countries worldwide will certainly produce challenges for those seeking to defend their property in coming years.