The global right has built a sentimental story around the South African white farmer.
In that story, the farmer appears as a uniquely gifted agricultural figure who turned land into food through discipline, instinct and inherited ability.
The story removes conquest, slavery, land dispossession, cheap Black labour, state-backed infrastructure, irrigation, commercial credit, agrochemical dependency, protected markets and generations of racialised advantage from the frame.
When foreign actors speak about offering South African farmers opportunities abroad, they usually mean white farm owners. They rarely mean African farm supervisors, farm managers, tractor operators, irrigation workers, animal handlers, seed keepers and small producers who have kept farms working while receiving none of the global sympathy attached to white ownership.
I know this history through research, politics and memory. As a child, I grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, after my South African mother married a Rhodesian farmer in the early 1970s. I watched the racial economy of settler agriculture from close range. I saw who did the labour, who knew the land, who understood the animals, who handled the daily rhythms of production and who carried the farm when the white farmer went away for long holidays, army stints or business.
That early experience stripped the romance from the settler-farmer myth for me. The farm did not stop because the white owner left. Black labourers, foremen and supervisors kept the system alive because they held the working knowledge.
South Africa’s own figures expose the same structure. Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) recorded 757 628 paid workers in commercial agriculture by June 2018, with 461 693 full-time employees and 295 934 part-time or seasonal employees.
Among full-time employees, Stats SA counted 407 399 ordinary farm workers, 15 963 farm managers and 23 175 farm foremen and supervisors. These figures describe an agricultural system that runs through labour, supervision, technical knowledge and hierarchy rather than individual white brilliance.
The public reputation of the farm owner depends on this layered workforce. Supervisors and foremen know when irrigation lines fail, when a crop carries disease, when livestock need attention, when machinery sounds wrong, when harvest timing changes and when a decision made from the office will damage production in the field.
Their knowledge comes through daily contact with soil, animals, workers, weather and machinery, while the owner often receives international recognition because property law places his name above the farm gate.
The wage structure tells its own story. South Africa’s 2026 national minimum wage sets the farmworker floor at R30.23 for each ordinary hour worked. Commercial agriculture can present itself as efficient partly because the people who prune, spray, harvest, pack, drive, irrigate and supervise receive wages that keep the cost structure low.
Land completes the picture. The 2017 Land Audit found that white individual landowners held 26.66 million hectares or 72%, of farms and agricultural holdings owned by individuals, while Africans held 1.31 million hectares, or 4%, in that category.
The same audit records the major role of companies and trusts, which means racial advantage often sits behind corporate and legal forms as well as individual title.
White commercial farming grew inside that property regime. It gained scale through law, capital and state design. It then presented scale as merit. The farmer who inherited land, borrowed against it, mechanised it, hired cheap labour and accessed commercial seed and markets became the public face of agricultural competence, while the Black people who worked the system remained largely unnamed.
The seed question adds another layer. South Africa’s commercial agricultural system does not rest on some pure natural genius passed through white bloodlines. It rests, in important commodity sectors, on corporate seed systems and input packages. BFAP and CropLife estimate the 2021-22 GM maize area at 84.5%, with 65% of the maize area planted to stacked insect-resistant and herbicide-tolerant maize. Their assessment also places GM soybean adoption at a conservative 95%.
These figures do not make commercial farmers irrelevant. They make the racial mythology absurd. A commercial farmer working with proprietary seed, herbicides, fertiliser, irrigation, finance, insurance, storage, logistics and export channels operates inside a capital-intensive system. That system rewards access as much as ability and it rewards inherited position before it ever tests natural skill.
African farmers face a different historical landscape. Stats SA’s 2024 General Household Survey counted 3.33 million South African households involved in one or more agricultural production activities.
Of these, 3.115 million were Black African households, compared with 130 000 white households. This means Black households participate in agriculture on a mass scale, although policy, media and finance rarely treat their production as central to national food sovereignty.
Most of these households farm because food insecurity presses directly on daily life. Stats SA reports that households involved in agriculture mostly did so to secure either an additional source of food, at 75.5%, or a main source of food, at 12.6%. Only 7.2% farmed to generate income. This production carries survival, care and household reproduction rather than the export glamour attached to commercial estates.
Smallholder and farmer-managed seed systems intensify this argument. Research on farmer-managed seed systems in the Eastern Cape describes systems in which smallholder farmers save, replant and exchange seed from previous harvests. These practices hold agrarian knowledge that corporate agriculture tries to displace through dependency on purchased seed and chemical packages.
Drought brings the comparison into focus because commercial farmers and small producers do not face climate stress with the same buffers. This brings us back to the international question.
When foreign governments, organisations or political networks speak about offering South African farmers land, visas or farming opportunities abroad, they should define farming skill through competence rather than ownership.
They should ask who can manage irrigation, machinery, livestock, pruning, planting, harvesting, storage and workers.
They should ask who can farm with technology and who can farm when technology fails.
They should ask who understands commercial systems and who also understands survival agriculture, saved seed and drought adaptation.
On that measure, many African farm supervisors and small farmers deserve the first invitation.
They know the commercial farm from within, while they also understand the conditions that shape African food production outside the protected world of white capital.
They have carried the practical knowledge of South African agriculture while the global right converted white ownership into a morality tale.
A serious agricultural visa programme would recruit African farm supervisors, farm managers, skilled farm workers, women seed keepers and small producers. It would offer land access, co-operative ownership, credit, machinery, training exchanges and market access. It would treat agricultural knowledge as something produced through labour and history, rather than something conferred by a title deed.
South Africa’s white farmer myth survives because the world keeps looking at the owner while ignoring the workforce.
The moment one counts the workers, studies the wage structure, reads the land audit, follows the seed systems and listens to African producers, the story changes.
The people who deserve global farming opportunities include those who have worked the land without owning it, managed production without receiving status and produced food without inheriting the state-backed privileges of settler agriculture.
Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker and political analyst. She specialises in African politics, geopolitics, multipolarity, media power, Western imperialism and the unfinished question of African sovereignty in post-apartheid South Africa.
When foreign governments, organisations or political networks speak about offering South African farmers land, visas or farming opportunities abroad, they should define farming skill through competence rather than ownership