Resource information
A good indicator of successful farm redistribution cases has to be the continuation of viableproductivity rates in their post transfer periods. Continued productivity benefits all thestakeholders that are involved in the process. Unfortunately negative productivity levels havebeen reported in numerous South African land redistribution transfers in recent years. A gametheoretic perspective is adopted to argue that cooperation among key stakeholders, which couldbe enforced through long term contracts between a land buyer, sellers and new owners, wouldlead to higher productivity levels and other benefits. Additional benefits would, for example,include market related prices paid by a buyer. Sugarcane farm transfer cases from twomunicipality districts in KwaZulu Natal province are used to show that the productivity rates inpost transfer periods of cooperative land sales were more than 10% higher than the ratesobserved before such transfers. At the opposite end of the scale, the productivity rates in noncooperativeland sales dropped by 16% after land takeovers. Furthermore, the prices paid forfarms that became less productive after transfers were higher by more than 40% compared tothose paid for productive farms. The cases illustrate the values of cooperative strategies ineconomic transactions.
