“Mostly” because there obviously are some cases, but those do not statistically differ from crime in general.
Also strange to immediately think of South Africa when reading about Ghana. Ghana is closer to Brazil and Spain than it is to SA.
Which does not say farmers, or white farmers specifically, are targeted disproportionately - I was unable to find statistics on this. But they are targeted:
"Yet the available research shows that most crime against white farmers is criminally motivated, the perpetrators seeking firearms, money, or vehicles, and that the violence used is instrumental to these purposes. Farms, remote and scattered, are seen as easy targets. In a small number of cases, the motive may be revenge for eviction or past ill-treatment." [1]
Note that South Africa has 6x the murder rate of the USA, so saying farmers are under attack is certainly true, even if they're not disproportionately under attack.
Edit: I looked around some more, and there does not appear to be very reliable data, but depending on how you slice the numbers, farmers may be disproportionately under attack by a factor as high as 6 [2].
Let me also remark on how curious it is that the media would so confidently call this theory 'debunked' (and racist!), when by their own admission, there is insufficient official data (gathered by the majority black government) to conclude either way [2]. I do not recall this level of skepticism being so widely applied to the Black Lives Matters movement.
Edit 2: User angersock (whose post is dead) did find what looks to be official statistics: "According to the South African Institute for Race Relations, commercial farmers, who are predominantly white, were twice as likely to be killed as the average citizen." [3]
I am confident that, should this be brought to the BBCs attention, they will run a front-page story correcting their earlier claims that this is a racist myth.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/safrica2/Safarms1.htm#_1_1
See the Wikipedia article someone else linked for more recent sources of data, and the observation that farm attacks today are actually decreasing.
I’m reading this thread with no context or agenda and I don’t see the first commenter saying anything about white farmers.
When you say “started this thread” that seems misleading because you brought an interesting perspective about allegations regarding the victimizations of white farmers in to this. But it didn’t seem to be at all what the original commented was elucidating.
Actually the vulnerability of farmers to violent depredation in contrast to hunters or herders has been proposed as a huge factor throughout history and prehistory guiding physical and social evolution.
That was my first association.
So, I don’t know what the original commenter meant but I’m not certain you do either.
Quote: “it is unclear whether farmers are at greater risk of being murdered than other South Africans”
Later: “Fact-checkers have widely identified the notion of a "white genocide" in South Africa as a falsehood or myth.[12][17]”