On one hand you had heavily subsidised, highly mechanised white farms on the most fertile land available, whilst the black population eked out a living in overcrowded infertile homelandson the other. Black people owned an average 1.3 hectares whilst white people owned 1,570. South Africa may have been self-sufficient in food but this came with an extremely high economic and social price tag. The programme that emerged evolved gradually out of a process of learning, public consultation and discussion on what works and what doesn't. Awareness of a project's governance structure - of the rules and trust is an important determinant of project success.
Large projects are significantly less likely to be economically successful.
The survey of land reform beneficiaries suggested that even though it has been far harder than anticipated to implement land reform the way it was originally envisaged, it nevertheless has considerable potential to improve the productive capacity and welfare of South Africa s rural poor. Implementation and evaluation could benefit from linking land reform more explicitly to and learning from other parts of the government's Reconstruction and Development Program. To enhance beneficiaries feeling of ownership and chanced of economic success, beneficiaries should be required to make some contribution of their own. Decentralising project approval to local government where information is more readily available would improve the monitoring and surveillance of performance, and speed up implementation and thus assessment of the productive potential. Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions.