South Africa to release 2.5 million hectares of state land to black farmers

South Africa is releasing about 2.5 million hectares of state-owned land to black farmers and issuing them title deeds, President Cyril Ramaphosa has said, in one of the government's largest land transfers since the end of apartheid.

Ramaphosa said land access alone will not build a viable black farming sector. He said the transfers must come with financing, skills development and mentorship so that new owners can farm productively and stay on the land.

The title deeds are central to the plan. Much state land allocated under earlier land reform was leased to beneficiaries rather than transferred to them. Critics said this left farmers without secure tenure and without collateral to raise bank loans for equipment, seed and livestock. Ownership is meant to let recipients borrow against their land and invest in it.

Land ownership remains one of South Africa's most politically charged issues. The Natives Land Act of 1913 confined black South Africans to a small fraction of the country's territory. The colonial and apartheid governments that followed entrenched that division through forced removals. A government land audit in 2017 found that white South Africans, about 7 percent of the population, held 72 percent of farmland owned by individuals.

Since 1994, successive African National Congress governments have pursued restitution and redistribution, but progress has lagged behind official targets. The original goal of transferring 30 percent of white-owned commercial farmland was repeatedly pushed back.

In January 2025, Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act. It replaced apartheid-era legislation from 1975 and allows the state, in limited circumstances, to expropriate land in the public interest with nil compensation. The law drew sharp criticism from US President Donald Trump, who in February 2025 signed an executive order halting US aid to South Africa and cited the act. Pretoria rejected claims that the law permits arbitrary land seizures, saying any expropriation remains subject to judicial oversight.

The release of state land, rather than privately held farms, lets the government expand black ownership without the legal and diplomatic disputes that expropriation has provoked.