Food For Mzansi co-founder Ivor Price reflects on the grim reality of South Africa’s slow agricultural transformation, drawing on troubling statistics released by agriculture minister John Steenhuisen this week. Despite three decades of political freedom, black farmers remain locked out by bureaucracy and economic gatekeeping.
There are numbers and there is the truth, and somewhere between the two lies the horror of our national story. This week, agriculture minister John Steenhuisen dropped a few figures – figures that, if we are still capable of being ashamed, should have left us stunned.
But we have seen these numbers before, haven’t we? The research was conducted by Agbiz chief economist Wandile Sihlobo and Professor Johann Kirsten back in 2021. We have recited them like mantras, marveled at them in conferences, and shaken our heads over them in hushed conversations between the privileged and the powerless. And still, nothing changes.
Consider also the indictment laid bare by Sihlobo in his book, A Country of Two Agricultures. Despite the rhetoric, despite the promises, despite the perfunctory nods toward transformation, the share of black farmers in commercial agricultural output remains pitiful.
A paltry 4.7% of maize, 3.1% of soybeans, 1.3% of wheat, 2.4% of cotton, 12.8% of citrus, 10.2% of deciduous fruit, 1.6% of viticulture, 1% of potatoes, 8.6% of tomatoes, 11% of wool, and 12.8% of mohair.
Even in livestock, where the echoes of our ancestors’ toil should resound most clearly, only 34% of cattle production is owned by black farmers, despite their deep connection to the land. Poultry production fares no better at a mere 4.2%.
We were supposed to have come a long way. Three decades since political freedom, and yet black hands still struggle to grasp what was always theirs. Land remains a battleground, not of policies and speeches, but of hunger and exclusion.
The corridors of power are lined with men who, in their carefully curated pragmatism, have convinced themselves that incrementalism is the only path forward. They call it stability. They call it market confidence. They call it realism.
But what it truly is – what it has always been – is fear. Fear that true transformation, the kind that does not ask for permission, might unravel the fragile peace upon which their fortunes were built.
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Agricultural transformation: The numbers that never change
What is most insidious about the slow rot of our progress is that it allows those in control to pretend that something is happening. The commercial agricultural sector can parade a few hand-picked success stories, a handful of black farmers who have managed to climb the fortress walls.
They will be celebrated at conferences, paraded at dinners, proof – if you squint hard enough – that the system works. And yet, the numbers do not lie.
The vast majority remain locked out, struggling in the shadows of a world they were promised but will never inherit.
Too many of the organisations that should be champions of justice choose, instead, to defend privilege with a fervour that is nearly religious. They clutch their documents, their legal arguments, their market efficiencies, as though they were the sacred texts of a divine order that must never be questioned. And they will tell you, with straight faces and calm voices, that the problem is not transformation but rather those who dare to demand it.
But let us speak the truth, as bitter as it is. The land, shaped by history’s injustices, remains concentrated in the hands of a few, and its fruits are still gated behind bureaucracy, behind economic systems designed to exclude.
The farmers who work the land without ownership, the rural children who will inherit nothing but debt, the black professionals in the sector who hit ceilings made of a substance far more unyielding than glass – these are not anomalies. They are the design.It is easy, in moments like this, to lose hope. To believe that nothing will change. But history is a relentless force, and the demands of justice do not fade simply because those in power wish them away. There is a reckoning coming.
Perhaps not today, perhaps not tomorrow. But the land remembers, and so do the people. And when the weight of patience finally crumbles, when the veil of pragmatism is torn away, this country will have to answer for the promises it made and the lives it discarded in the name of delay.
- Ivor Price is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Food For Mzansi. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Food For Mzansi.
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