The majority of South Africa's rural population resides in the former homelands. Although cash from urban and government sources is the mainstay of the rural economy in many areas, the multiple and diverse livelihood base of rural households is not widely recognised. This diversity includes the land-based strategies of arable farming, livestock husbandry and consumption and trade in natural resources. This article examines recent and emerging literature from a livelihood perspective in terms of the role and value of each of these three land-based livelihood sectors. We conclude that the contribution of land-based activities to rural livelihoods is important in both financial and social terms, and is probably greater than previously appreciated within the whole gamut of livelihood strategies adopted by rural households, including transfers from formal employment and state pensions. We examine the policy implications of this for land and agrarian reform in South Africa.

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A key issue in debates on agrarian reform in South Africa is the potential for small‐scale farming, in conjunction with redistributive land reform, to make a significant contribution to employment creation and poverty reduction. Two problems hinder these debates – the paucity of reliable data on small‐scale agriculture, and lack of clarity on the meaning of terms such as ‘smallholder’ and ‘small‐scale farmer’. This paper applies class‐analytic perspectives on social differentiation to critically examine these terms, and explores the prospects for ‘accumulation from above and from below’ through agrarian reform, drawing on wider debates within the Southern African region. It focuses in particular on smallholder irrigation schemes, potentially a key focus of policy, and presents research findings on production and marketing of fresh produce in one such scheme in Tugela Ferry, KwaZulu‐Natal. Survey data show that farming households combine agriculture and various forms of off‐farm labour, as is often the case throughout the region, and that accumulation in small‐scale agriculture is constrained by a number of factors, including the inherited and largely untransformed agrarian class structure of South Africa. In this context, expanded access to land and water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such accumulation; wider structural change is also required.

Over the past few decades, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa have pursued redistributive land reform as a means to address rural poverty. The Livelihoods after Land Reform (LaLR) study was carried out between 2007 and 2009, to understand the livelihood and poverty reduction outcomes of land reform in each of the three countries. The South African component focused on Limpopo province, and investigated land reform processes, trajectories of change and outcomes in thirteen detailed case studies. This paper summarizes some of the main findings from the South African study, and briefly compares them with findings from Namibia and Zimbabwe. The paper argues that a fundamental problem affecting land reform in both South Africa and Namibia is the uncritical application of the Large-Scale Commercial Farming (LSCF) model, which has led to unworkable project design and/or projects that are irrelevant to the circumstances of the rural poor. Nevertheless, some 'beneficiaries' have experienced modest improvements in their livelihoods, often through abandoning or amending official project plans. IntroductionRedistributive land reform has been pursued in South Africa over the past two decades. In South Africa at present, there is near-consensus that land reform has been unsuccessful, but a startling lack of agreement as to its problems and what remedies should be administered. Broadly, land reform is criticized both for its pace -about 8 per cent of commercial farmland redistributed over 18 years versus the 30 per cent over 5 years initially targeted -and its performance: the livelihoods (and production) outcomes on the 8 per cent of redistributed land on which this paper focuses.

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