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How much land is used for agriculture in South Africa? 

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In this paper it is argued that urban agriculture represents an issue of considerable importance for South African policy makers.
Our findings confirm that the variation in land requirements for food is a complex, non-linear function of agricultural production techniques, population growth and dietary patterns and show that the complex relationship between dietary pattern changes, and economic development challenges future predictions of land requirements for food in South Africa.
Land availability and the legislative requirements for afforestation in South Africa are limiting factors for future growth and therefore increasing the productivity per unit area of existing land offers the largest potential to improving forest productivity and reducing the unit cost of wood production.
The present situation in South African agriculture subsequently provides both an unique and necessary opportunity for advancing a market assisted land reform program.
Survey data show that farming households combine agriculture and various forms of off-farm labour, as is often the case throughout the region, and that accumulation in small-scale agriculture is constrained by a number of factors, including the inherited and largely untransformed agrarian class structure of South Africa.
The research demonstrates unequivocally that restituting or redistributing land that is geographically remote from the residence location of the beneficiaries, and with no service or technical support to assist them with start-up agricultural activities, provides no effective solution to reducing poverty in rural South Africa.
We draw on original material from a study on the Wild Coast, South Africa to underline that agriculture currently may be in a stage of de-activation in scale, but certainly not in terms of scope, intensity, agrarian identity and contribution to wellbeing.
This article is thus the first to use two surveys of a group of land reform projects to show the true status of farms in their post-transfer phase in South Africa.

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