When world leaders engage, the assumption is always that they engage on issues based on verified facts, which their administrative staff are supposed to prepare. Under this assumption, we thought the meeting at the White House on 21 May between South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and US president Donald Trump would follow this pattern.
Disappointingly, the televised meeting was horrifying to watch as it was based on misrepresenting the reality of life in South Africa.
Issues of agriculture, farming and land (and rural crime) were central to the discussions. What is clear to us as agricultural economists is that the skewed views expressed by Trump about these issues originate in South Africa. This includes Trump’s statement: “But Blacks are not farmers.”
In our work as agricultural economists, we have, in many pieces and books (our latest titled The Uncomfortable Truth about South Africa’s Agriculture), tried to present South Africans with the real facts about the political economy policy reforms and structural dimensions of South African agriculture.
Writing on these matters was necessary given that official data – agricultural census 2017, as well as the official land audit of 2017 – all provide an incomplete picture of the real state and structure of South African agriculture. The reason is that the agricultural census, which is supposed to provide a comprehensive and inclusive assessment of the size and structure of the primary agricultural sector, and the land audit, which was supposed to record the ownership of all land in South Africa, are incomplete in their coverage.
The incomplete and inaccurate official data provides fertile ground for radical statements by the left and the right – and novices on social media. This is why South Africa has to deal with falsehoods coming from the US. These include Trump’s statement that black people are not farmers in South Africa.
South Africa is to blame for providing inaccurate data to feed these false narratives.
The facts presented here should allow a more nuanced interpretation of South Africa’s farm structure. Firstly, there are more black farmers in South Africa than white farmers. And not all white commercial farm operations are “large-scale”, and not all black farmers are “small-scale”, “subsistence” or “emerging”. Most farm operations can be classified as micro, or small in scale.
This is important so that one doesn’t view South Africa’s agriculture as mainly white farmers. Indeed, we are a country of two agricultures with black farmers mainly at small scale and accounting for roughly 10% of the commercial agricultural output. Still, this doesn’t mean they are not active in the sector. They mainly still require support to expand and increase output, but they are active.
The facts
In the wake of the circus in the Oval Office, we were amazed by the total silence of the many farmers’ organisations in South Africa. We have not seen one coming out to reject all of Trump’s claims. The only thing we can deduce from this is that these falsehoods suit the political position of some farmer organisations. But at what cost? Will many of their members be harmed by trade sanctions or tariffs against South Africa? The US is an important market for South Africa’s agriculture, accounting for 4% of the US$13.7 billion exports in 2024.
When Ramaphosa highlighted the fact that crime, and rural crime in particular, has an impact on all South Africans and that more black people than white people are being killed, Trump’s response was disturbing, to say the least: “But Blacks are not farmers”. This requires an immediate fact check.
We returned to the text from our chapter in the Handbook on the South African Economy we jointly prepared in 2021. In the extract below, we discuss the real numbers of farmers in South Africa and try to provide a sensible racial classification of farmers to denounce Trump’s silly statement.
As highlighted earlier, the two latest agricultural censuses (2007 and 2017) are incomplete as they restricted the sample frame to farm businesses registered to pay value added tax. Only firms with a turnover of one million rands (US$55,500) qualify for VAT registration.
We were able to expand the findings from the censuses with numbers from the 2011 population census and the 2016 community survey to better understand the total number of commercial farming units in South Africa. The Community Survey 2016 is a large-scale survey that happened between Censuses 2011 and 2021. The main objective was to provide population and household statistics at municipal level to government and the private sector, to support planning and decision-making.
Data from the 2011 population census (extracted from three agricultural questions included in the census) shows that 2,879,638 households out of South Africa’s total population, or 19.9% of all households, were active in agriculture for subsistence or commercial purposes.
Only 2% of these active households reported an annual income derived from agriculture above R307,000 (US$17,000). This translates into 57,592 households that can be considered commercial farmers, with agriculture as the main or only source of household income. This corresponds in some way with the 40,122 farming businesses that are registered for VAT as noted in the 2017 agricultural census report.
If we use the numbers from the agricultural census it is evident almost 90% of all VAT-registered commercial farming businesses could be classified as micro or small-scale enterprises. If the farm businesses excluded from the census are accounted for under the assumption that they are too small for VAT registration, then the fact still stands that the vast majority of all farm enterprises in South Africa are small family farms.
There are, however, 2,610 large farms (with turnover exceeding R22.5 million (US$1.2 million per annum) which are responsible for 67% of farm income and employed more than half the agricultural labour force of 757,000 farm workers in 2017.
Another way to get to farm numbers is to use the 2016 Community Survey. Using the shares as shown in Table 2, we estimate there are 242,221 commercial farming households in South Africa, of which only 43,891 (18%) are white commercial farmers. (This is very much in line with the VAT registered farmers but also acknowledging the fact that many white farm businesses are not necessarily registered for VAT.)
Let’s consider only the agricultural households with agriculture as their main source of income, surveyed in the 2016 community survey. We end up with a total of 132,700 households, of whom 93,000 (70%) are black farmers. This reality is something that policy makers and farm organisations find very difficult to deal with and it seems that Trump also found this too good to be true.
We have tried here in a long winded way to deal with farm numbers and how to get to a race classification of farmers in South Africa. In the end we trust that we have managed to show that there are more black farmers in South Africa than white farmers. Their share in total output is smaller than that of their white counterparts. The National Agricultural Marketing Council puts black farmers’ share of agricultural production as roughly 10%. But these numbers are also incomplete and largely an undercount.
It will always be challenging to get to the real number of black farmers’ share of agricultural output as nobody would ever know whether the potato or the cabbage on the shelf came from a farm owned by a black farmer or a white person but operated by a black farmer, for example. As South Africans know, the labour on farms, in pack houses, distribution systems and retail are all black. So, the sweat and hard work of black South African workers are integral to the food supply chain in South Africa.
Let’s get these facts straight and promote them honestly.
Wandile Sihlobo is the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC).
Johann Kirsten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
