Any aspiring farmer would envy Nick Serfontein.

The Bonsmara cattle he rears on 15,000 acres of pasture in the high plains of South Africa’s Free State province are fat and sleek, prize-winning specimens of arguably Africa’s finest beef-producing breed.

With state-of-the-art feedlots, a modern abattoir and lucrative retail outlets, the Sernick Group he heads is one of Free State’s most successful agricultural ventures.

But Mr Serfontein is also a member of South Africa’s privileged white minority, who could — if certain politicians get their way — lose everything he has built up for years and receive nothing in return.

In South Africa, and much of the world, sympathy for white farmers like Mr Serfontein is in short supply. He is, after all, the beneficiary of a system of government that perhaps epitomised white privilege more pointedly than anywhere on earth.

Nearly a quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, the country remains one of the world’s most unequal places. Business, mining and its most affluent residential areas are still often white-dominated.

Yet perhaps nowhere is the difference starker than in South Africa’s agricultural sector. Just four per cent of privately-held farmland is owned by black South Africans, according to government figures, while whites account for 72 per cent, with the remainder under the control of the country’s other minorities. The overall population of the country is just 9 per cent white, and 76 per cent black.