A review of the land reform beneficiary training in South Africa: The role of agricultural extension

Lack of competent commercial farming skills in emerging farmers is identified as one of the reasons for poor productivity on redistributed commercial farms. To address this shortcoming, the government and non-governmental organisations spend significant amounts of money providing a range of beneficiary training. However, very few objective studies exist that report how these pieces of training occur and how they are performed. This research aims to provide an initial basic understanding of the requirements and loopholes in the land reform beneficiary trainings, paving the way for future studies. The objective was to identify and discuss the role of agricultural extension in administering these beneficiary trainings. These objectives were achieved by critically reviewing the relevant literature, policy documents, and some relevant official statistics. In our synthesis of the literature, we identified key attributes for a competent commercial farmer which are: the need to know how to adopt, regularly, new technology, new production processes, and new marketing arrangements, while continuing to take a calculated risk and have sound business and financial management skills. We then assessed these attributes to all small-scale farmers and land reform beneficiaries and found little theoretical evidence of such. However, some of the beneficiary trainings converge with the key commercial farmer competencies but others were missing. There were significant discrepancies in the beneficiary training expenditure and few details of the service providers and skills supplied.