South Africa's parliament on Thursday approved a bill allowing state expropriations of land to redress racial disparities in land ownership, an emotive issue two decades after the end of apartheid.
Most of South Africa's land remains in white hands and many commercial and small-scale farmers are currently facing tough times because of the worst drought in at least a century.
The bill, in the works since 2008, will enable the state to pay for land at a value determined by a government adjudicator and then expropriate it for the "public interest," ending the willing-buyer, willing-seller approach to land reform.