There is a general agreement that land reform has fallen short in achieving its intended objectives. One of the most commonly cited reasons for the slow progress in the land redistribution programme is lack of clear criteria in beneficiary selection. The State Land Lease and Disposal Policy, which is one of the current land redistribution policies, has identified commercial-oriented smallholders in the communal land as one of the land redistribution beneficiaries. However, there is little detailed empirical evidence on their constituents. Such information is crucial for policy-makers including the agricultural extension personnel, as this will enhance effective policy design and appropriate design of extension advisory service which will contribute to the success of land redistribution. The objective of this article is to fill this gap by profiling commercial-oriented small-scale farmers in three provinces that have the highest number of smallholders in South Africa. A survey of 833 farmers from these three provinces was conducted. Descriptive statistics and Binary Logistic Regression were used to analyse the data with the use of STATA software. The results show that a potential emerging farmer is a 55 years old male with primary education. Furthermore, 57% of the farmers are willing to relocate to commercial farms if there is government support and require an average farm of 152 hectares where they want to plant maize. The article concludes with some recommendations and implications for agricultural extension.
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Siphe Zantsi (2019) studied this question.