ActionSA's Trollip: Nationalising farmland would punish farmers of every race

Athol Trollip, ActionSA's parliamentary leader, argues against proposals from the EFF and MK Party to nationalise agricultural land, saying the debate has been wrongly framed as a racial one. He cites historical evidence of successful black commercial farming before apartheid-era laws entrenched racial inequality, and notes that 32 years of land reform have already transferred 19.3 million hectares without solving underlying problems, since land alone doesn't create successful farmers. Pointing to failures in North Korea and Zimbabwe versus China's shift toward market incentives, he warns nationalisation would jeopardise a sector contributing 14% of economic activity, and calls instead for better-targeted transformation support..By Athol Trollip*.There is a dangerous idea gaining traction in South Africa's Parliament: that the country's agricultural land and food production should be nationalised and removed from the commercial market.This is being dressed up as radical economic transformation. But beneath the rhetoric lies a profoundly simplistic view of agriculture, one that risks destroying precisely the productive capacity on which South Africa's food security depends.The argument is simplistically reduced to a racial caricature: “the white farmer is rich, exploitative and inherently part of an unjust system; therefore, land and agricultural production should be taken into state ownership”. We as ActionSA reject both the caricature and the proposed solution. Farming is not black or white – it’s about farmers. And our own history demonstrates this.Black South Africans have a long history of successful commercial farmingThe idea that commercial farming is somehow inherently a "white" activity is contradicted by the historical record.Colin Bundy's seminal work on the rise and decline of the South African peasantry documents the substantial response of African farmers to commercial opportunities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African agriculturists were not simply subsistence producers: they responded positively to markets, expanded production and participated in commercial agriculture.African farmers in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere produced crops and livestock for markets well beyond their immediate communities. Historical evidence records African-grown maize being sold into distant markets, while wool became an important cash crop among African farmers.Indeed, an historical account cited by South African History Online records a colonial official, Mr. Hemming, observing that, acre for acre and farmer for farmer, African farmers could produce more than European farmers despite having access to more primitive equipment.The point is not to romanticise the past or to pretend that African and European agriculture operated under identical conditions. They did not. The point is that African farming has always been capable of producing commercially.The Natives Land Act of 1913 did not create racial discrimination in land ownership from nothing. Dispossession and discriminatory restrictions had already been taking place for decades. But the Act institutionalised and dramatically intensified this process, restricting where black South Africans could acquire and occupy land and setting the country on a path towards increasingly segregated agriculture.At the same time, white agriculture benefited enormously from state support over subsequent decades, including access to land, subsidised finance, infrastructure, research, extension services and other forms of government assistance. Black farmers were increasingly confined to overcrowded areas and denied comparable access to the resources needed to develop commercially.The racial composition of South African commercial agriculture was therefore not simply the result of some innate difference in agricultural ability. It was shaped by history, legislation and state intervention. That history matters. But it does not lead us to nationalisation. It leads us to a very different conclusion: if we want more successful black farmers, we need to create the conditions in which more black farmers can succeed.Thirty-two years of land reform — and another policy cannot simply be the answerSince 1994, successive ANC governments have attempted to address the injustices of the past through restitution, redistribution, tenure reform and agricultural transformation.There has been no shortage of policies and programmes. South Africa has moved from the Settlement/Land Acquisition Grant to the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development programme, the Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme, the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, the Recapitalisation and Development Programme, and subsequently developed further approaches to land allocation, leasing and agricultural support.These programmes have transferred substantial amounts of land. Government's own Development Indicators report records 19.3 million hectares transferred through land-reform interventions between 1994 and August 2023, including land through redistribution, restitution and PLAS.And yet we continue to hear that the answer to South Africa's agricultural problems is simply to take more land and nationalise. This should cause us to stop and ask a more fundamental question: If land alone were the answer, why have more than three decades of land-reform interventions not solved the problem?The uncomfortable truth is that land is only one input into a successful agricultural enterprise. A farm requires capital, labour, seed, fertiliser, machinery, water, electricity, fuel, technology, infrastructure, skills, finance, management, endeavour and access to markets.Giving someone land without ensuring that these other ingredients are available does not automatically create a successful farmer. And blaming commercial farmers for the failures of government programmes is not a substitute for fixing those programmes.This is why I am increasingly concerned by what I hear in Parliament's Agriculture Portfolio Committee and by the rhetoric coming from some of the so-called progressive and radical economic transformation parties. There is a real danger that the failures of land reform, rural development and agricultural transformation will be blamed on white commercial farmers rather than on the policies, institutions and government departments responsible for making transformation work. That would be both politically convenient and economically disastrous.Nationalising agriculture would make the problem worseThe rhetoric I have heard from EFF and MK Party representatives about nationalising agricultural land and food production is particularly alarming because it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how farming works. There appears to be an assumption that food production should be a “patriotic endeavour” rather than a commercial enterprise. But land does not produce food. Farmers do.Farmers — black and white — combine land with capital, labour, skills, technology and other inputs to produce food. Every one of those inputs has a cost. A farmer must ultimately recover those costs from the sale of produce and earn a return on the capital and risk involved. That is not exploitation. It is the basic economics of production.Farmers also respond to market signals. Prices influence what they plant, how much they plant, which technologies they use, whether they expand or contract production, whether they sell domestically or export, and whether they plant the same crop again next season.These decisions cannot simply be replaced by political slogans. If the state takes ownership of agricultural land and assumes control over production, it does not make these economic realities disappear. It merely transfers the risks to the taxpayer and the decisions to the state.History gives us ample reason to be sceptical.North Korea's highly controlled agricultural system has suffered chronic shortages, with the state controlling the marketing and distribution of agricultural output. FAO assessments have repeatedly highlighted shortages of fuel, fertiliser and machinery, as well as the weakness of incentives within the system.Zimbabwe demonstrates the dangers of destroying productive capacity, investment and security of tenure during radical land reform. Its experience should be studied carefully rather than reduced to political sloganeering.And perhaps the most instructive example is China.China's Communist government collectivised agriculture, but subsequently recognised the failures of the collective model. From the late 1970s it introduced the Household Responsibility System, giving farming households greater control over production and stronger incentives to increase productivity. Agricultural output and rural incomes subsequently rose sharply.Even Communist China learned that farmers respond to incentives. South Africa should not learn the opposite lesson.Food security does not mean producing everything ourselvesAgriculture is not a marginal part of our economy. Primary agriculture contributes around 2.8% of GDP, while the broader agricultural value chain accounts for roughly 14% of economic activity and supports close to 950,000 jobs. South African agricultural exports reached approximately R268.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, producing a trade surplus of around R24.6 billion in that quarter.These are not merely farms. This is an interconnected economic ecosystem of farmers, input suppliers, manufacturers, transport companies, processors, exporters, retailers and millions of workers. And it is an ecosystem that depends on markets.Consider maize and wheat. South Africa is highly competitive in maize production and can produce a surplus for export. Yet we can also import maize when it is more economical to do so in particular markets. With wheat, the situation is different: South Africa produces wheat, but domestic production does not meet our total demand, so we import the balance.There is no contradiction here. It is called comparative advantage. We should produce and export what we can produce competitively and import products that other countries can produce more efficiently. We do not need to be autarkic — completely self-sufficient in every agricultural product — to be food secure.Food security means ensuring that South Africans have reliable access to sufficient, nutritious and affordable food. Sometimes that means producing domestically. Sometimes it means importing. Sometimes it means exporting a surplus and using the proceeds to buy what we do not produce efficiently ourselves. Trying to produce everything ourselves, regardless of cost, would simply make food more expensive.The choice is not between transformation and commercial agricultureThis is where government has failed. The answer is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by dismantling one of South Africa's most productive and globally competitive sectors. Nor is the answer to pretend that the status quo is perfect.There are legitimate and urgent challenges around land ownership, access to finance, emerging farmers, tenure security, rural development and the participation of black South Africans in commercial agriculture. But the answer to these challenges is better transformation, not nationalisation. Every rand allocated to land reform, agrarian reform and rural development should be judged by one question: does it result in more productive land, more successful farmers, more jobs and more affordable food?That means supporting commercial farmers, emerging commercial farmers and communal farmers — black and white. It means giving aspiring farmers the skills, capital, infrastructure, secure tenure and market access they need to succeed. It means creating more farmers, not fewer. And it means rejecting the dangerous fiction that farming belongs to one race..Read more:.South Africa just voted against its own farmers: Michael Kransdorff.South Africa's future agricultural economy should not be black or white. It should be productive. ActionSA believes in inclusive economic empowerment: a model that measures people by their ability and contribution rather than reducing them to racial categories.There is an old analogy that trying to play a tune on a piano with only the black keys or only the ivory keys is impossible. South Africa needs both. We should reject those who promise a sweet melody while insisting that half the piano must be discarded. Farming is not black or white – it’s about farmers. And South Africa needs more of them..*Athol Trollip is ActionSA’s Parliamentary Leader and a member of Parliament’s Agriculture committee .Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. 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ActionSA's Trollip: Nationalising farmland would punish farmers of every race

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