Soil Sustainability and Land Reform in South Africa

Abstract

When South Africa’s present government came to power, Africans who comprised about 80% of the population had access to 13% of the country’s total land area and to an even smaller proportion of land with high agricultural potential. To bring about a more equitable distribution of land the government embarked on a Land Reform Programme. A number of constraints prevent ‘good agricultural potential’ from being employed as a prerequisite in this Programme when designating white-owned farms for transfer to peasant farmers, and there is therefore concern that the transferred farms will not be sustainable. The government commissioned the development of methodologies to monitor various aspects of the transferred land.

The first stage of this development involved carrying out full, detailed environmental audits of four land transfers in KwaZulu Natal. The four areas differed from one another in respect of biophysiographic characteristics, spatial extent and land-use histories. The influence of land-use practices over the two decades prior to transfer, the areas’ inherent susceptibility to erosion and agricultural potential, the post-transfer status, and the beneficiaries’ perceptions of the areas’ water, soil, vegetation and animal resources, were assessed.

This paper describes the procedure used to assess sustainability of the soil resource in the four case studies. A comparative analysis of the four audits enabled 14 key indicators of (i) the soil’s potential susceptibility to erosion, (ii) contemporary erosion status, (iii) agricultural potential, and (iv) impact of land-use practices, to be identified. The indicators were rated in terms of their potential influence on sustainability, and a composite measure representing the overall sustainability of the soil was derived. In addition to providing a reliable assessment of soil sustainability, the procedure proved to be simple, quick and cheap to use and is intended to provide the basis for a nationally applicable methodology for monitoring soil sustainability in land transfers.