Rethinking Land Reform and Its Contribution to Livelihoods in South Africa

Abstract

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.