The main purpose of this chapter is to explain why recent agricultural development interventions have been largely unsuccessful in improving the lives of the rural poor (Aliber and Hall 2012; Hajdu et al. 2012; Jacobson 2009). The chapter presents a critical discourse analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 1995, 2001) of the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP), implemented by the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture from 2003 onwards. Case material from three villages where the MFPP has been operative will provide some empirical contexts to debate the extent to which the MFPP has managed to break with the heavily criticised apartheid development interventions in the region and to critically examine the assumptions underlying the formation of the MFPP. The MFPP's major aim is to reduce rural poverty by raising crop yields. The programme has experienced many practical problems, such as the delayed payment of funds which resulted in late planting, which in turn led to failure in raising yields and reducing poverty. These practical failures have been acknowledged both by programme management (Jacobson 2009), in an external audit, and in other publications on the programme (Damgaard Hansen 2006; Hajdu et al. 2012; Masifunde Education and Development Project Trust 2010). I argue, however, that in order to understand why the programme has failed to achieve its aims we need to focus, not on its practical implementation problems, but on the underlying assumptions about how smallholder agriculture should be transformed (Hajdu et al. 2012; Jacobson 2009).

The MFPP, its aims and guiding assumptions

The analysis in this chapter draws on 11 policy documents on the MFPP, acquired either directly from the senior manager for resource planning at the Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture, who was the administrative head of the MFPP at the time of its initiation (6 documents), or from other researchers investigating the MFPP (5 documents). The department's ‘Strategic Plan 2003–2006’ (ECDA 2003) guided agricultural development in the province at the time when the MFPP was implemented in the villages studied for this chapter. The strategic plan is included in the analysis to reveal the extent to which the ideas about agricultural development and smallholder farming presented in the MFPP are specific to the programme or representative of the policy view at provincial level.