Land reform in South Africa aims, among other things, to build ‘the economy by generating large-scale employment, increasing rural incomes and eliminating overcrowding’ (ANC 1994). While there is ‘near-consensus that land reform has been unsuccessful’ (Aliber and Cousins 2013), various factors have been raised as contributing to land reform’s failure to meet its goals. Among the factors negatively affecting livelihoods and income generation is the government’s enforcement of an agribusiness model promoting large-scale production for (export) markets. This article uses a case study to illustrate how the implementation of large-scale, and sometimes capital-intensive, production negatively affects the livelihoods of the beneficiaries. It challenges the perspectives that associate success, or even the viability, of land reform projects with the agribusiness model by demonstrating how difficult it is for the beneficiaries to sustain production autonomously.

Land reform in South Africa has been criticised for its failure to significantly improve beneficiaries’ livelihoods. Among the reasons is the government’s stubborn enforcement of large-scale farming on land reform projects. This article presents the experiences of land reform beneficiaries on a single case farm in Limpopo Province, confirming, on one hand, that indeed the capital-intensive model of production negatively affects their production and livelihoods. On the other, the article shows that where alternative land uses are introduced, even alongside large-scale farming, land contributes to beneficiaries’ livelihoods. The article argues that a nuanced analysis that goes beyond the narrow commercial and econometric value of land, to include its social value, allows us to comprehend the full extent of land’s contribution to rural livelihoods in South Africa.

This study explores implications of the failure to accommodate formal land restitution in the Zimbabwean Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), resulting in neglect of local communities’ autochthonous connections to land especially where their interests clash with those of political elites. It makes the point that this opened land reform to abuse by political elites and marginalized competing local community interests in prime land and valuable agricultural properties. In the absence of a formal policy for restitution, elites mobilized political and state power to enforce their commercial interests over those of neighbouring communities. Drawing from international experiences, the study argues that a formal policy of land restitution would enable local communities, including ethnic minorities, to legally reclaim lost ancestral land and limit elite capture of valuable agricultural properties.

The South African government intends to improve rural livelihoods through land and agrarian reform. However, in doing so the government is enforcing large-scale production in the land reform projects with little regard for the beneficiaries’ background or capabilities, which are not suited to large-scale production. The article demonstrates how large-scale farming is negatively affecting land beneficiaries’ production by undermining their ability to produce the quality products (and adequate quantities) that satisfy the standards in the increasingly concentrated markets dominated by agribusiness.

No abstract