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South African agrarian policy aims to integrate smallholder tree‐crop farmers into high‐end value chains with growth and employment potential, generally neglecting socio‐economic differentiation amongst them. This paper aims to analyse socio‐economic differentiation amongst tree‐crop farmers in Vhembe District, Limpopo, using a class‐based analysis based on livelihood diversification and accumulation. Cluster analysis of survey data and semi‐structured interviews reveals that most tree‐crop farmers engage in petty commodity production, internally differentiated by their combination of income sources and livelihood strategies. Farmers' ability to engage in accumulation and upward class mobility is generally severely constrained by limited access to capital. Agricultural diversification offers livelihood potential but limited possibility for accumulation, whereas salaried nonfarm work offers more promising prospects for accumulation but limited livelihood opportunities. A minority demonstrated characteristics of small‐scale capitalist farmers, internally differentiated by their reliance on salaried employment or agricultural production. The findings challenge the notion of an undifferentiated class of market‐oriented smallholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa have pursued redistributive land reform as a means to address rural poverty. The Livelihoods after Land Reform ( LaLR) study was carried out between 2007 and 2009, to understand the livelihood and poverty reduction outcomes of land reform in each of the three countries. The South African component focused on Limpopo province, and investigated land reform processes, trajectories of change and outcomes in thirteen detailed case studies. This paper summarizes some of the main findings from the South African study, and briefly compares them with findings from Namibia and Zimbabwe. The paper argues that a fundamental problem affecting land reform in both South Africa and Namibia is the uncritical application of the Large- Scale Commercial Farming ( LSCF) model, which has led to unworkable project design and/or projects that are irrelevant to the circumstances of the rural poor. Nevertheless, some 'beneficiaries' have experienced modest improvements in their livelihoods, often through abandoning or amending official project plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the less studied legacies of settler colonialism and agrarian dualism in South Africa is the substantial population of people living and working on (still mostly) white-owned commercial farms - a feature distinct from most other countries in Southern Africa. Many farm workers and farm dwellers in South Africa experience precarious tenure, and poor housing and labour conditions. This paper explores what is happening to farm labour and to agricultural capital in Limpopo province. Findings from field research on four horticultural and livestock/game farms illustrate how economic pressures, combined with land restitution and labour migration, have produced new and contested trajectories of agrarian change - largely cementing a historical shift from independent land tenure to wage labour but also prompting diversification of livelihoods. We explore the ways in which actors on farms - workers, dwellers, owners and managers - have responded with regard to three spheres of contestation: ownership, production and employment; tenure and livelihoods; and family, gender and children. We argue that, contrary to official visions of reform, long-term processes of agrarian change predating political transition - proletarianization, casualization and the externalization of farm labour - are being accelerated. These processes, and the ways in which they are producing new contours of social differentiation, are illustrated at farm level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]