Freedmen News Watch · October 12, 2026, 8:20 AM CDT
Key Facts
- Ramaphosa says government releasing 2,5 million hectares to black farmers (via IOL)
Ramaphosa says government releasing 2,5 million hectares to black farmers.
President Cyril Ramaphosa says the government is releasing approximately 2,5 million hectares of state-owned land to black farmers, as he calls for greater access to finance, training and agricultural support.
Image: GCIS President Cyril Ramaphosa says the government is releasing approximately 2,5 million hectares of state-owned land to black farmers and providing them with title deeds as part of efforts to grow a new generation of commercial farmers.
In his weekly letter to the nation, Ramaphosa said expanding access to land, financing and agricultural training was essential to transforming the sector, creating jobs and strengthening South Africa’s food security.
“The first step in building a new generation of South African farmers is providing them with titled access to land,” he said. Through the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, the government is releasing the land in various parts of the country to black farmers, Ramaphosa said.
He stressed, however, that access to land needed to be accompanied by funding, skills development, mentorship and technology to help emerging farmers establish commercially successful businesses.
“Far too often, emerging farmers are kept trapped at subsistence level because they cannot get the financing they need for farming inputs, infrastructure and additional land,” he said.
Ramaphosa cited Redlands Farm, a commercial dairy farm in Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape owned and run by young black farmers, as an example of how financial support could help farmers expand their operations.[1]
About the Freedmen News Watch
This series follows the news that bears on Black American freedmen and their descendants, the people freed from slavery in this country: citizenship and treaty-rights cases such as the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole Freedmen, the Dawes Rolls and Freedmen’s Bureau records, heirs’ property and Black land loss, reparations and descendant-based programs, and the history and memory of emancipation. It covers the hard news and the good news alike. Every passage is quoted as reported and linked to its source, and nothing is generated. The photograph on each post is a public-domain file photo from Wikimedia Commons, credited, and shows a place or monument, not the people in the story.
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References
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