The article surveys seven Southern and East African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Swaziland and Botswana) and assesses the extent to which rural development has been able to stem rural-to-urban migration. The seven countries have a smaller urban industrial base than South Africa, so that rural development was until recently generally designed more as a counter to urban migration than as a means of stimulating food production. Now, there is greater emphasis on improving agriculture's terms of trade with corresponding positive results for food production. This lesson is not necessarily the most useful one for South Africa, where food distribution, rather than quantity, is the problem, and where the priority is to raise the incomes and standards of living of the poorest groups of rural residents. One of the major relevant lessons from the seven countries is that attempts radically to alter indigenous tenure patterns generally succeed only in disrupting agricultural production and social cohesion.