Is land tenure a significant variable for promoting agricultural productivity in rural villages?: the case study of Nonkcampa Village in the Buffalo City Municipality, Province of the Eastern Cape, South Africa

Abstract

The research explored the causal relationship between the communal land tenure and the stagnant agricultural productivity in rural villages. It is assumed that there is covariance between the communal land tenure and the stagnant agricultural productivity. The communal land tenure deprived the villagers of the land ownership rights to mortgage their landholdings to secure agricultural credit from financial institutions, or to advance them as own contributions to obtain Government-provided grants under the ILRAD. Under such circumstances, the villagers could not raise the level of agricultural productivity. The Permit to Occupy (PTO) certificates, issued to the landholders, provided for usufruct rights only i.e. right to occupy and use an allotment. The related research was conducted at Nonkcampa village. The metatheory, "Positivism" and the quantitative paradigm were applied to collate and analyse the data. The research findings confirmed the correlation between the land tenure and the agricultural productivity, as the respondents claimed not to have had any access to agricultural inputs. Hence, the agricultural productivity on the arable land had stagnated.