“The report reviews the achievements and shortcomings of land and agrarian reform in South Africa in the first decade of democracy and provides a description of the status of these initiatives as at 2004. Chapter 1 presents a brief historical background and describes the challenge of land and agrarian reform faced by the democratic state in 1994. Chapter 2 describes the research methods used in the preparation of this report. Chapter 3 is a brief retrospective of the past decade of land and agrarian reform, noting the shifts during this period and distinguishing between the ‘Mandela era’ (1994–1999) and the ‘Mbeki era’ (1999–2004). The next four chapters describe the status of each of the main land reform programmes, as at 2004. Chapter 4 deals with land restitution, with a focus on restitution of land in the rural areas and its contribution to agrarian transformation. Chapter 5 describes the various land redistribution programmes, noting the emergence of the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD)programme as government’s primary means
of redistributing land. Chapters 6 and 7 deal
with the attempts to enact land tenure reform in two distinct contexts – among farm workers and farm dwellers resident on commercial farms, and among people living under communal tenure regimes either on land reform projects, in the former ‘coloured reserves’ or in the former bantustans or ‘homelands’.”
