South Africa urgently requires practical agrarian reform policies that transfer land to black farmers who can use it productively to sustain their livelihoods and to supply markets.

Land reform in Zimbabwe is widely stereotyped as ‘a corrupt land grab by Zanu PF and its cronies’, precipitating ‘a calamitous decline in agriculture’ from which the country ‘has never recovered’, writes Ben Cousins. Clearly agriculture in Zimbabwe has experienced significant problems in the years following radical land reform, says Cousins, but based on the findings of a three-years study, the notion of “total failure” is not accurate. So what does this mean for future land policy?