Accelerated exiting of captured commercial producers and the structural impact thereof: An agent-based approach

The government of South Africa is trying to transform the country’s commercial agriculture through land redistribution programmes to a more inclusive and racially equitable sector. However, the redistribution efforts have not been very successful and radical approaches, such as expropriating land without compensation, have been approved partially, although the potential harm of this approach is known. This paper explores the prospects of commercial producers who would be willing to exit voluntarily in the near future to make land available for redistribution. In addition, it also considers what factors are restricting the acceleration of this rate of exit from a land-supply perspective with respect to barriers to exit. The prospect of structural change from such acceleration is also explored, using three scenarios. An agent-based mathematical model is used to implement the three scenarios. The model is constructed from a dataset of 450 commercial producers across South Africa. The results suggest that a reasonable amount of arable land could be available for redistribution, with modest structural change regarding animal production, despite drastic alterations in veld. These results provide some guidelines that for an alternative to the harmful and radical approach of land expropriation currently being considered. All potential exiting commercial producers have common reasons for doing so, which could be used to initialise a positively inclined, structured discussion on land supply as a foundation for redistribution, which, to a large extent, is approached from a land demand perspective.