Land redistribution in South Africa’s land reform policy: a better way to select beneficiaries

ABSTRACT

South Africa’s land reform policy might succeed better if it had clear criteria for selecting beneficiaries for land redistribution. The National Development Plan identifies the intended beneficiaries and states how they should be selected, but implementation of the plan is haphazard. A 2019 report by the Presidency’s Land Reform and Agriculture Advisory Panel recommends that the beneficiary selection process be clear and transparent. In this paper, we respond to the report and expand on a proposal in the 2020 draft Beneficiary Selection Policy. Our study is based on a review of the relevant policies and the literature on beneficiary selection, and a profile of 833 potential land redistribution beneficiaries randomly selected from three provinces in South Africa. We highlight the flaws in the existing selection methods. Building on the suggestion of Vink and Kirsten (2019) of a tender or job application process, we suggest improvements we suggest improvements that could reduce inefficiencies and make the selection process inclusive and transparent.

KEYWORDS:

• Land redistribution
• emerging farmers
• smallholders
• beneficiary selection
• South Africa

JEL:

• O21
• Q15

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions in previous drafts of the paper. We are also grateful to a team of enumerators who assisted in smallholder data collection. Most importantly, we extend our gratitude to the farmers who volunteered to participate in our study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are various categories of land reform beneficiaries, for various purposes. Our study is limited to agricultural land redistribution beneficiaries.

2 In the South African market-led land reform, on the willing seller–willing buyer principle, the State purchases land on the open market from willing commercial farmers and gives suitable beneficiaries access to it.

3 In response to this call by the LRAAP, a new draft Beneficiary Selection Policy has been published (DRDLR 2020) and comments have been solicited from the public. PLAAS (2020) has commented, criticising the lack of clarity as to who exactly the other beneficiaries are and the vagueness of the beneficiary categories.

4 Aliber, Mabhera, and Chikwanha (2018, 10) say that “in some if not many cases, however, the intended beneficiaries were already known”.

5 Our previously published work (Zantsi 2019), was based on the data used in the present study. It confirmed a positive correlation between total household income and willingness to relocate.

6 Homelands now former homeland were states only recognised in South Africa, where black people lived and farmed, after 1994 they were incorporated into South African provinces. These regions are still marginalised, and land rights are under communal tenure. People own small land parcels.

7 See Aliber (2019) for useful suggestions for different kinds of support.

8 A very common crop rotation is one between maize and soybeans, where a third of the planted area is dedicated to the latter each year and serves as the basis for the average planted area of 300 ha.

9 The stocking rates were taken from the Cape Farm Mapper, which used 2018 grazing capacity values provided by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (https://gis.elsenburg.com/apps/cfm/).

10 This was calculated as a function of farm and non-farm incomes plus an aspirational income. The aspirational income is the difference between the income a farmer thinks he or she can earn in the future and what he or she currently earns.

11 While these recommendations build on the draft Beneficiary Selection Policy (DRDLR 2020), they are more explicit; for example, we stipulate the preferred age range of the beneficiaries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation DAAD doctoral scholarship, National Research Foundation (project number 107800) and the Swiss National Science Foundation project number IZLSZI_170836.