Hunger in the former apartheid homelands: Determinants of convergence one century after the 1913 land act

Just more than one hundred years after the implementation of the 1913 Land Act, the subject of land reform and rural development are still at the forefront of public discourse within South Africa. Much of the literature suggests that post-apartheid interventions have not been successful at improving small-scale agriculture, which is seen as an important vehicle for improving rural food security. Nevertheless, data from the General Household Survey (GHS) indicate that household hunger levels have declined substantially in the post-2000 decade across the entire nation (as other estimates of household poverty have also indicated). In particular, this paper demonstrates that this trend has been more pronounced in the former homeland regions, eliminating the previously higher incidence of hunger there. Using linear probability models, this paper seeks to isolate which factors have led to the convergence of the homeland regions’ household hunger levels and those of households residing in non-homeland pa...