Minister Mzwanele Nyhontso: Second International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD+20)

Land: Past, Present, and Future: The Struggle of Peoples for Agrarian Reform

Your Excellency, President of Colombia and our Esteemed Host, Gustavo Petro
Honourable Minister Martha Viviana Carvajalino Villegas
Excellencies, Ministers, and Heads of Delegations
Senior Officials from FAO
Members of the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty
Government Officials, Activists, Scholars
Representatives of Social Movements, Communities and Indigenous Peoples
Ladies and Gentlemen

I stand before you today in the historic city of Cartagena, a city that breathes the air of resistance and the spirit of liberation, to speak on behalf of a nation that knows much about the bitterness of dispossession and the agonizingly long journey towards resolving the land and agrarian question. I bring greetings from the people of South Africa - a people who, thirty-two years into democracy, together with their government, civil society, academia and other progressive formations continue to strive towards the final resolution of the land issue.

27 February 2026, a few days from today, will mark the 49th anniversary of the death of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, a leader of the liberation struggle in our country who stood firmly and articulated a clear message about the struggle being primarily for the sovereignty of the oppressed African people over their land and for their national self-determination. The holding of this conference during Sobukwe Month thus invokes in many of us the spirit to follow in his footsteps in fighting for the return of the land and in striving to increase the quality of our efforts in this regard. 

Twenty years ago, in Porto Alegre, the world acknowledged the fact that equitable access to land is a prerequisite for peace and food security. Yet, two decades later, we see land concentration intensifying and the marginalization of the poor continuing unabated. We are here in Cartagena to declare that land should not be allowed to be hoarded by a few as it is the foundation of life, the cradle of societies, and the ultimate guarantor of the collective survival of humankind.

From our perspective as South Africans and Africans, we reiterate the point that there will never be any compromise on the question of land, which we see as lying at the core of the ongoing struggle for genuine social and economic development, and dignity of the vast millions of our people. There can simply be no compromise on the question of redress for the atrocious legacies of the colonial and past regimes which continue to linger.  

We also meet at a moment of profound global instability and the convergence of climate instability, persistent inequality, and the erosion of rural livelihoods. Across the Global South, the promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is being strangled by a global financial architecture that prioritizes profit over people. From the point of view of this conference, we are also seeing a tendency for the issues that are directly relevant to land reform and state-led land-related developments everywhere in the world, such as expropriation in the public interest of land reform, to suddenly be distorted simply because the potential beneficiaries are black people. We cannot accept such a deliberately slanted narrative and bullying tactics under the guise of non-existent notions such as a so-called ‘white genocide’.

In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, forests are being enclosed and in some instances literally alienated for private use, and water sources are being privatized, while small-scale food producers and fishers are being pushed further to the margins of society. We see the creation of new victims of environmental injustice in spite of pious sounding statements about ‘green transitions’, as land is seized ostensibly for carbon offsets and industrial mining.

Let us be clear: there can be no ‘just transition’ if it is associated with the displacement of small-scale producers. There can be no ‘food security’ if land and agriculture continue to be controlled by a handful of multinational corporations. Put simply, if we do not resolve the land question, we will never resolve the climate question, let alone the hunger question.

To understand why South Africa speaks with such urgency, it is important to understand our struggle. For over three centuries and subsequently with the advent of the 1913 Natives Land Act and the aggressive institutionalization of the oppressive machinery of apartheid from 1948 to 1993, the African majority were systematically stripped of their birthright, culminating with them being squeezed into 13 per cent of the land. Needless to say, the quality of this land was and remains marginal, and the territories that today we refer to as communal areas, which constitute much of this land, remain overcrowded and underdeveloped.

Since the end of formal and statutory apartheid in 1994, our government has made many efforts aimed at healing this festering wound triggered by and consolidated through dispossession, principally by passing enabling constitutional provisions, enacting relevant legislation and enunciating necessary policies. These interventions established three pillars of land reform, namely Restitution, Redistribution and Tenure Reform. While the implementation of this approach has seen some significant successes where a few communities have reclaimed their ancestral land, or others among the landless have been assisted to obtain land on which they have attempted some developmental activities, we must however have the courage to accept that progress has been slow.

We have thus prioritised the task of overhauling and recalibrating our land redistribution programme in its entirety, starting with the formulation of the Equitable Access to Land Bill. This legislation will not only provide simpler, more broad-based, more effective and faster procedures for ensuring equitable access to land for the landless. Most importantly, it will ensure that such access foregrounds those amongst our population who need it most, as well as those among the landless who clearly demonstrate the potential to become successful commercial producers.

This includes people who live in the communal areas who are presently struggling to gain access to land and other critical factors of production. It is important that we make clear the fact we have heard the criticism about what is often referred to as ‘elite capture’, hence our approach towards policy and legislation is guided by the principle of ensuring that land is made available to the landless on a non-discriminatory manner.

We reiterate that redistribution must be pro-poor and state-led, and it must affirm the right of women and youth to equitable access to land. We thus have a clear policy undertaking that 50 per cent of all land that is redistributed must go to women, and 40 per cent to the youth, to ensure the future of the resilience of the rural economy. Indeed, we are seeing a very encouraging trend whereby young people, including young women, are moving into farming with vigour and are demonstrating significant successes as emerging agrarian entrepreneurs.  We dare not fail them, and as such we are also pivoting strongly these groups as we strengthen the support system for the beneficiaries of all our land reform programmes. 

Over a couple of decades, South Africa implemented the ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ model, a market-led approach which did not bring about the desired transformation at the expected pace and quality. We have thus made attempts to explore and implement alternative approaches, assisted in no small measure in these efforts by some of our country’s academic institutions, civil society formations and social movements that continue to contribute towards the task of supporting the quest for land justice. We are happy to point out that these efforts are bearing fruit as we move tirelessly towards a new approach towards banishing land inequality in our country.

This also means that we cannot rely entirely on the whims of the property market; and indeed our country’s experience of the past thirty years or so demonstrates this reality most poignantly. This is one of the reasons for enacting the Expropriation Act and also for formulating the Equitable Access to Land Bill and the Communal Land Tenure and Administration Bill, which we regard as not merely legislative tools but as instruments of decolonization. To underscore our firm conviction that the market cannot be the sole arbiter of land transactions, the Office of the Valuer General is increasingly recalibrating its methodologies and approaches to ensure that the role of government in facilitating and mediating land transfers is enhanced and has a meaningful impact.

Indeed, too much land still remains concentrated in too few hands, but as government we are working towards correcting and addressing this situation. We are also addressing the challenge of illegal evictions from white owned commercial farms – a persistent phenomenon that affects farmworkers and labour tenants most acutely, by re-examining the legislative and policy frameworks and instruments that govern land tenure for those who reside and work on these farms.

Whether it is for a resident of a communal area in the Eastern Cape or Limpopo provinces of our country, or an indigenous inhabitant of the Amazon, land tenure must be secure, legally recognized, and protected from the predations of big capital. We must thus implement the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), not as mere suggestions, but as mandates.

We reject what has come to be known as ‘green-grabbing’, which is a phenomenon that refers to the displacement of communities from their land under the guise of promoting climate mitigation, conservation or eco-tourism. Our commitment towards supporting agro-ecology and farmer-led innovation means that we must protect our commons, especially pastures, forests, and fisheries, from enclosure. Indeed, we stand solidly committed to the support of small-scale fishers, and for their protection from the wanton and unjustified attacks that they continue to face. We also live by the principle that land reform is meaningless without water reform, as water is a precious, God-given resource that must be accessed by all, equitably as a birthright.

Our Department welcomes the proposal to empower FAO’s Global Land Observatory to continuously monitor the state of land governance. This will indeed enhance capacity to generate data that tracks not just hectares, but more importantly improve the quality of life and the dignity of the people on the land. We also call on the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to report periodically on the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Our commitment to the ICARRD+20 Declaration rests on firm foundations. It is not in our interest to promote the kind of ‘poverty alleviation’ that as the record of past decades clearly demonstrates, leaves the structures that perpetuate poverty intact. Our interest lies firmly in the genuine emancipation of rural communities and their areas. Towards this end, our rural development policy is shifting more decisively towards empowering rural households, women and youth to develop the capacity to enhance their contribution not only to themselves but also the entire rural economies. For us it is not sufficient to only provide access to land for small-scale producers, but to also facilitate their meaningful and beneficial participation in markets, processing, and supply chains.

Ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends,

The land question is one of the great questions of the twenty-first century. It is the question of who belongs, who owns, who eats, who is safe, and who survives. In South Africa, we have chosen our side. We stand with the landless, the poor, the farmworker, the labour tenant, the small-scale producer, and the marginalised women and youth.

Let this Cartagena Conference be remembered as the moment when the governments of the world finally listened to the cry of the soil. Let us leave here not only with a ‘declaration of intent’, but with a plan of action.

May our solidarity be unbreakable, and may the momentum that we build during this conference live on for many years to come.

I thank you.

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