President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced that his government is releasing about 2.5 million hectares of state-owned land to Black farmers, and giving them title deeds, as part of a drive to transform South African agriculture.
He set out the plan in his weekly newsletter on Monday 12 October 2026. It comes over a year after Donald Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ramaphosa, where the US president repeated claims that white farmers face a “genocide”.
This is not a seizure. The land is already owned by the state. It was bought over the years under the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy and sits in the Government Land Holding Account. Much of it is underused. For years, many Black farmers on state farms have held only short-term leases, which means they cannot borrow against the land or expand.
Ramaphosa says South Africa still has “two agricultures”. Predominantly white-owned commercial farms produce most of the country’s commercial output. Black farmers account for only around 10%.
Land alone will not be enough. The president says new farmers also need affordable capital, practical skills and mentorship from established farmers. He pointed to the Land Bank’s Blended Finance Scheme, which combines government grants with loans, and to Redlands Farm, a dairy farm in Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape run by young Black farmers.
The numbers behind the story
Thirty-two years after apartheid ended, ownership remains sharply skewed. The government’s 2017 land audit found that white people own about 72% of farms and agricultural holdings, roughly 26.7 million of 37 million hectares. White South Africans make up less than a tenth of the population.
Black ownership has grown since 1994, and it is far higher in some provinces. Agri SA’s own audit puts it at 74% of farmland in KwaZulu-Natal and 52% in Limpopo.
The “genocide” claim
Trump and Elon Musk have claimed that white farmers are being systematically killed. South African courts, major fact-checkers and independent researchers say the evidence does not support it. Farm attacks are real and often brutal, but the Transvaal Agricultural Union, a farmers’ group sympathetic to Afrikaner farmers, recorded 32 farm murders in 2024. South Africa recorded more than 26,000 murders in total that year. Farm workers, who are mostly Black, are among the victims.
The questions that remain
Critics are asking how beneficiaries will be chosen and whether state land will go to people who can farm it. Black farmers have complained of corruption, and of being removed from farms illegally. The Agricultural Business Chamber has backed the release of state land, arguing it could bring more Black farmers into commercial farming.
For the president, the test is whether title deeds, finance and skills reach farmers who can actually work the land.
Featured image: file photo of President Cyril Ramaphosa handing over a title deed at Tafelkop, Limpopo, on 22 May 2021. Photo: GCIS / GovernmentZA, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.