Determinants of potential land reform beneficiaries’ willingness to relocate from their former homeland homestead farms to commercial farms.

Abstract

The South African land reform, particularly the aspect of land redistribution, has received strong criticism of being slow and inequitable, contrary to how it is envisaged in numerous land redistribution policies. Consequently, the recent report of the land reform advisory committee appointed by the president highlighted several issues in the understanding of land redistribution beneficiaries and recommended research to fill those knowledge gaps and inform policy design. This study therefore attempts to understand which factors could determine whether commercially oriented smallholders in the former homelands, who are regarded as potential land redistribution beneficiaries, would be willing to relocate to commercial farms formerly owned by white farmers. This objective is achieved by implementing a binary logistic regression to a sample of 454 commercially oriented smallholders, purposively and randomly surveyed in KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo. The results show that age, number of schooling years (education), dwelling asset base and feeling constrained by farming in the former homeland can predict the likelihood of relocating. Marginal effects suggest that education, dwelling asset base and feeling constrained by farming in the former homeland have more weight in predicting beneficiary relocation likelihood (dependent variable). Based on these findings, the article makes recommendations for land redistribution policies.