Although black farmers are not new to South African sugarcane, a scheme to get dedicated farmers onto the best land is revolutionising an industry once regarded as the preserve of white sugar barons who presided over vast fiefdoms.

Blacks were denied the right to own land under apartheid and systematically kicked off the best properties to make way for whites. Now South Africa is eager to right some of the wrongs from the past.

Ndlovu, 30, is one of a handful of farmers to pass through a rigorous selection process to buy one of 20 farms carved out of an Illovo Sugar Ltd estate near the Sezela sugar mill on South Africa's hot and humid east coast.

"I am very happy that I have got my own farm, but now I want a bigger farm. In two year's time I want to buy another one.This here is just a start," Ndlovu said as he surveyed his lush cane fields on the edge of the Indian Ocean.

The 98-hectare farm covering steep hills and valleys supports 12 staff employed by Ndlovu to cut cane that is sent to a mill less than 10 kilometres away.

He was reluctant to disclose what he earned from his farm, but said: "I break even each month."

Ndlovu said he had managed a 1,500 hectare sugar farm for Illovo before he put his pension towards the 800,000 rand ($135,600) purchasing price of his farm.

"I worked on someone else's farm for 12 years and all the time I dreamed of having my own farm. This is my chance to prove myself. If I die, my family has a chance of making it."

Big boys band together to help little guys: Apart from Illovo, the world's third largest sugar producer, Tongaat Hulett Ltd and development-financing agencies are putting up funding and training to get black farmers onto commercially viable cane farms.

And interest is high.

Illovo has more than 350applications for a further 18 medium-scale farms it is carving from an estate at Ifafa, not far from Sezela, said Illovo's managing director Don McLeod.

"We will have 58 medium-scale farmers, all with leaseholds by this time next year," he said.

Tongaat aims to develop emerging growers into commercial entities rather than operate a small-scale subsistance level, said Peter Prince, Tongaat Sugar's commercial director.

"Sugar cane has proven itself as a development crop that has been instrumental in uplifting communities near mills," he said. Tongaat has about 30,000 registered small-scale growers on plots of around 10 hectares each and these supply Tongaat's five mills with about two million tonnes of cane a year, he said.

McLeod said 13,000 small growers contributed about 1.3 million tonnes of cane to Illovo's seven mills.

Jack Wixley, the executive director of the South African Cane Growers' Association, said there were 45,000 registered small-scale growers in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province,the heart of South Africa's sugar industry.

"Of the 45,000, between 30,000 and 40,000 are active, but that number will grow. The problem is that urbanisation is nibbling around the small-grower areas and putting pressure on the amount of land that can be used," he told Reuters.

He said about 75 per cent of the small-scale growers were supplementing incomes while the rest were full time farmers.

Small growers contributed about 20 per cent of the industry's production and generated some 500 million rand ($81.55 million), Wixley said.

"Small growers were developed in a very paternalistic way, but now they are being made part of the fabric of the industry and it is paying off," he said.

Black cane farmers out to prove a point -- and make money: It is not only the east coast cane belt where sugar is easing the lives of poor communities.

The inland Komati basin in a corner of Mozambique and Swaziland and flanked by the Kruger National Park is home to just over 1,000 small-scalefarmers.

Transvaal Sugar Ltd, which owns two mills in the area and produces about 350,000 tonnes of sugar, is largely supplied by small-scale farmers whose plots start at seven hectares and are irrigated from nearby dams.

"We will sometime soon reach a stage where small growers will deliver the bulk of our cane," said Octavius Madonko who manages the company's small-scale growers' affairs.

"I have been in this area for 10 years and I have seen it change from being very poor just because of sugar," he said.

In KwaZulu-Natal province small-scale growers are protected from the ravages of sharp hikes in interest rates that were raised to defend a steadily weakening rand savaged by speculators since May.

Pete Simms from the KwaZulu Finance Corporation (KFC), one of the key facilitators of loans, said their rates were reviewed once a year and were kept soft by low-interest loans from government and the Development Bank of South Africa.

"It is critical that we keep interest rates as low as possibleotherwise we would have a lot of failures," Simms said.

The KFC was offering loans at 18 per cent, below the 23.5 per cent prime lending rate offered by major banks after a hike of five percentage points since May.

Ndlovu's neighbour, Thulas Ngidi, said black farmers had a lot to prove while they struggled to overcome hostility from some white farmers bitter at the disposal of Prime lands to unproved farmers.

"For us it is an opportunity to prove that we can do it. Past thinking was that only white farmers were successful. We want to prove that theory wrong."