South Africa will release about 2.5 million hectares of state-owned land to black farmers and provide title deeds to beneficiaries as part of efforts to expand black participation in commercial agriculture, President Cyril Ramaphosa has said.
The land will be made available through the government’s Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, a key component of South Africa’s land reform programme aimed at addressing inequalities in land ownership that persist more than three decades after the end of apartheid.
Ramaphosa said titled access to land was critical to developing a new generation of black commercial farmers but cautioned that land redistribution on its own would not guarantee success.
“The first step in building a new generation of South African farmers is providing them with titled access to land,” he said late Tuesday.
He added that farmers also required access to finance, training, mentorship, technology and markets if they were to build sustainable commercial enterprises.
South Africa’s land reform programme, launched after the country’s democratic transition in 1994, seeks to redress historical dispossession of black South Africans under colonial and apartheid rule.
The programme rests on three pillars: land restitution for people dispossessed after 1913, land redistribution to broaden ownership and tenure reform to secure land rights for vulnerable communities and farm dwellers.
Despite years of reform efforts, ownership and production in the agricultural sector remain heavily skewed.
Ramaphosa said predominantly white-owned commercial farms continue to account for most agricultural output, while black farmers contribute only about 10 percent of commercial production.
“We still have what has been called ‘two agricultures’,” he said.
The president argued that broadening participation in commercial farming was not only a matter of correcting historical injustices but also essential for the country’s future food security.
He warned that relying on a relatively small segment of the population to meet South Africa’s food needs would become increasingly unsustainable as the population grows and demand for food rises.
JN/APA