Working Paper 125 Land Tenure and Economic Development in Rural South Africa: Constraints and Opportunities Martin Adams, Ben Cousins and Siyabulela Manona December 1999 Overseas Development Institute Portland House Stag Place London SW1E5DP UK Acknowledgements This paper is based on the proceedings of the National Conference on Land and Agrarian Reform in South Africa, 26-28 July 1998; organised by the National Land Committee (NLC), Johannesburg, and the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape. The paper was written by Martin Adams, consultant with the DLA (
[email protected]); Professor Ben Cousins from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape (
[email protected]), and Siyabu Manona, consultant with Ikhwezi Development Facilitators (siyabu @ iafrica.com). ISBN 0 85003 439 6 © Overseas Development Institute 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers. Contents Abstract 5 1. Introduction 7 2. Economic case for land tenure reform 9 2.1 The international tenure reform debate 9 2.1.1 Land titling and agricultural production in Africa 10 2.1.2 Putting the land titling issue in perspective in Africa 12 3. The status of tenure in the former homelands 15 3.1 Economic constraints imposed on rural households in the former homelands 16 3.2 Rural instability arising from land tenure disputes 19 3.3 Economic constraints on government investment in development 21 3.4 Constraints to private sector investment 21 4.