Nexus between homestead food garden programme and land ownership in South Africa: Implication on the income of vegetable farmers

The paper evaluates the impact of homestead food garden programme and land redistribution policies on the income of vegetable farmers in South Africa, using data collected from 500 vegetable-producing households. Endogenous switching regression and propensity score matching approaches were employed in our analysis. Our findings demonstrate that the participation in a homestead food garden programme can significantly enhance the welfare of participants by increasing their gross margins by 5.21%. We further show that the land redistribution policy by the South African government appears to have a significant impact on vegetable production and gross margins of vegetable farmers. We found that vegetable farmers who own more than 1 hectare of farmland through the land redistribution policy perform better in terms of gross margins, relative to those who own less than 1 hectare by 9.28% gross margin. The policy implication of our findings is that the distribution of farmland under the agriculture and land reform policy should be accompanied with food policy interventions, such as the homestead food garden programme, and also that the willingness of people to participate in farming should be paramount to the land redistribution policy. Acknowledgement : We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the southern African systems analysis centre, the national research foundation and the department pf science and technology in South Africa as well as the international institute of applied system analysis in Austria.