Data on potential land redistribution beneficiaries in South Africa

Abstract

Land reform is one the controversial topics confronting the democratic South Africa, as such it remains top in the country's agenda. The South African land reform is implemented through three pillars – land restitution, land tenure reform and land redistribution. Land redistribution, which is the focus of our data, is more important since large tracks of land are envisaged to be redistributed through this pillar. Despite that land redistribution has been implemented for almost twenty-five years, progress to-date is disappointing. Numerous factors have been cited to explain the unsatisfactory results. Among these explanations and reasoning it appears that not much information that can enable formulation of sound and effective policies is known about the prime land reform beneficiaries, the commercial oriented smallholders. Because the household we surveyed are the prime target beneficiaries of land redistribution, we refer to them as “potential emerging farmers”. This term is drawn from the generic definition of land reform beneficiaries known as emerging farmers. The little that is known about potential emerging farmers is from scattered case studies to which little meaningful analysis and generalisations could be made. Other smallholder datasets such as Statistics South Africa's General Household Surveys are too generic in nature, offering too little details for understanding the potential land reform beneficiaries. Here we present a modestly detailed dataset of 761 surveyed farm household heads of potential emerging farmers. These are smallholder farm household heads who at least have sold a minimum of 20 percent of their produce in previous season. The data spans across three most smallholder populous provinces in South Africa, namely the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu Natal and Limpopo. These areas, the former homelands or marginalised areas that were designated for blacks during apartheid, house smallholders with high potential of becoming the next black commercial farmers. The data consists of socio-demographic information, farmer assets, production and production orientation, risk attitudes, aspirations and willingness to partake in land redistribution.