Farms

In the old days, i.e. pre-election, I followed the developments in Zimbabwe fairly closely because land was so central to the disputes.  It appears the same arguments are now taking place in Namibia.  What does this have to do with SD politics?  Well, there's a tenuous connection.  SD, along with states like NE, MN, MO, IA, have all adopted restrictions on land ownership by corporations to eliminate "corporate farming" and the displacement of family farmers.  I once told a professor of corporate law at Berkeley about this and he nearly did a spit-take.  He had no idea such restrictions existed.  Anyway, for lots of background on this you can see the chapter about it in my book American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly.  That's the reason I follow land fights and government experiments with "land reform."  Here's a New York Times article about Namibia and here's an excerpt:

That a seemingly routine dispute can suddenly explode into a showdown between the races underscores the fragility of white land holdings here - and the powder keg that long suppressed tensions over land in southern Africa threaten to become. Neighboring Zimbabwe, where the government has seized farms from thousands of white commercial farmers, has demonstrated how extreme measures can plunge a country into economic ruin, racial violence and widespread suffering.