In most developing countries, the provision of rural roads is directly linked to the need for rural residents to subsist and earn income through agriculture. The purpose of rural roads in these countries is primarily, therefore, to enable residents to ship agricultural goods to market. In most of the world, a sustainable rural community is based on agriculture. Due to the apartheid legacy, however, land tenure in rural South Africa is substantially different from other countries, with most productive land and agriculture concentrated in the hands of white commercial farmers. This results in a relatively low level of the population directly dependent on agriculture, and, as Figure 36 indicates, a much lower percentage of the labour force engaged in agriculture than in comparable developing countries.
Some residents live on communal lands.
Of these four types of communities, only commercial farm areas have close to adequate Level 4 road access to the main road network. Very little consistent data exist to suggest an answer to this question, and estimates range between 43,000 and 200,000 km of road. Figures 38 illustrates the findings from both KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape. The trend is consistently one of overestimated need for level four roads. Given the low level of road adequacy in most rural communities, Moving South Africa expected to find a high degree of customer dissatisfaction, especially with travel times.