A report released on Friday by the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) on farm tenure, shows that despite numerous legislative initiatives to advance the land rights of disadvantaged South Africans, few resources have been made available to realise and enforce these rights.

"In practice, land reform is yet to address the central concerns of poor people living on farm land owned by others -- first, to have secure rights to land and housing and second, to expand their access to resources to support independent and sustainable rural livelihoods," says the University of Western Cape-attached PLAAS researcher Ruth Hall.

Hall says in the report that the rights of farm dwellers are weak in law and largely unrealised in practice.

Attempts to protect their tenure rights to land and housing on commercial farms have generally proved ineffective and existing laws have led to farm dwellers being increasingly evicted through legal means, on the strength of court orders issued by magistrates and confirmed by the Land Claims Court, but without alternative places to go or alternative means of survival.

"The appalling conditions faced by farm workers, and the inability of the land reform programme to offer viable options to secure and improve their livelihoods, represent a major challenge to South Africa in realising human rights."

The report indicates that farm workers are among the lowest paid category of worker, and that in 2001 there were an estimated 900,000 farm workers. This number was declining as job shedding and casualising trends continued.

"When farm workers are dismissed or retrenched, evictions usually follow. The rise in evictions over the past ten years has been attributed in part to farmers' hostility to the introduction of labour and tenure laws," Hall said.

On the issue of evictions, there was evidence that people continued to be evicted from farms, both legally, in terms of the Extension of Security of Tenure Act 62 of 1997, and illegally, in violation of ESTA, with a vast majority not being provided with alternate accommodation.

"Monitoring of evictions in Kwazulu-Natal indicates that illegal evictions could outnumber legal evictions by as much as twenty to one."

Another key finding related to the implementation of ESTA by the Department of Land Affairs, which was described as "reactive", focusing on intervening where people are threatened with eviction rather than proactively securing long-term tenure rights for farm dwellers.

The report also criticises government for not adequately monitoring the implementation of ESTA, with government unable to report either on the scale or spread of evictions.

PLAAS called for an "urgent" need to change existing policy, noting that the Department of Land Affairs' land reform budget accounted for only 0,4 percent of the national budget. R3,6-million was earmarked to support interventions in evictions while the bulk of the budget of R442-million was for funding the purchase of land through the land redistribution programme.

Commenting on the research findings, Hall said in view of changes happening in commercial agriculture, there were strong arguments for farm workers, who are among the poorest South Africans, to be made a priority for land reform.

"There also needed to be more public debate on how ESTA should be reformed," she said.

Friday's report, which was published as part of the "Evaluating land agrarian reform in South Africa" research programme, will be launched together with the other reports in the series on October 8 in Cape Town - Sapa