A critical appraisal of South Africa’s market-based land reform policy: The case of the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme in Limpopo

In 1996 less than 1% of the population owned and controlled over 80% of farm land. This 1% was part of the 10.9% of the population classified as white (Stats SA 2000). Meanwhile, the 76.7% of the population that is classified as African had access to less than 15% of agricultural land, and even that access was without clear ownership or legally-recognised rights. An estimated 5.3 million black South Africans lived with almost no tenure security on commercial farms owned by white farmers (Wildschut & Hulbert 1998). The legacy of apartheid was not just the inequality in access to resources such as land, but a faltering economy that by 1994 had been through two years of negative growth and left the majority of the population in poverty (Sparks 2003)