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Minister Lulu Xingwana said a recovery would coincide with plans to revive South Africa's rural economy and stem the flow of migrants who have been moving to cities and straining urban resources.
Decades of neglect have left South Africa's rural areas far behind its highly industrialised cities, with many small towns and villages still without basic amenities like electricity and sanitation.
Critics say massive urbanisation threatens to hamper a drive to draw more blacks onto the land in order to reverse the inequitable pattern of land distribution engendered by apartheid policies.
Land reform
Most of the country's prime agricultural land belongs to whites - a remnant of the large-scale evictions carried out against the black majority during white minority rule.
Xingwana's department has dismissed claims that its land reform drive is misdirected, but on Friday she signalled that there may now be a shift in thinking.
"People all over the world are moving to where there are opportunities for economic empowerment, for jobs, for education, for entertainment, if you're talking about young people," she told reporters at an agricultural conference in the Eastern Cape province.
"This is the case also in our country. People believe, maybe rightfully so, there aren't opportunities or hope of finding jobs in rural areas.
"We are saying we need to use the land through our agrarian reform to create jobs to grow the rural economy."
Looking beyond Western markets
Nearly 60% of South Africa is "urbanised" and in eight years that could rise to 70%, according to a 2005 study by the independent Centre for Development and Enterprises.
The flow of rural folk to cities has in part been driven by the gradual decline of South African farming, which has been pressured by post-apartheid liberalisation.
The farming sector shrank 6.9% in the first quarter of 2006 after expanding by 3.9% in the previous quarter, according to official gross domestic data (GDP) data.
Its contribution to GDP was around 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2005 compared with around 6% in the 1980s.
But Xingwana said the government hoped this trend could be reversed as Pretoria looked beyond traditional European and other Western markets, often criticised for saddling poor nations with unfair trade conditions.
Support for entrepreneurs
She said her department also wanted to strengthen support for cooperatives, strongly rooted in old-fashioned African entrepreneurship.
"Traditionally we've always looked at Europe and the US as our partners in trade. Today we are saying there are opportunities in Africa for our people, in the East, in China. There are huge markets opening up," she said.
"Also, we're looking to countries such as Brazil. We are building relationships, we are having bilateral agreements, both to strengthen our cooperation and also in the area of trade. We are working very closely to grow that side."
