GAUTENG
COMMENT, by Pete Bower
MAGAZINE
HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLOT PROFITABLE
Vol 17 No 6
June 2016
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FRONT COVER
Massey-Ferguson’s “new” M-F35
model revealed at the Nampo
Show last month isn’t actually a MasseyFerguson. Find out what it is on
page 16
Smallholder farmers
L
and reform programme. Smallholder agriculture. Commercial
farming. Food security ~ four terms that raise the temperature of
anybody contemplating the subject of farming in South Africa.
On the one hand, you have the ANC, and by extension the government, attempting to
fulfil the desires of previously dispossessed families for land by expropriating or otherwise acquiring land currently owned by whites and “returning” it to its previous owners.
This, by the very nature of previous land tenure, means the development of a “new”
class of small farmer, and some effort is being put by government into formalising the
nature of this new supposedly agrarian class.
On the other hand, it is no secret that commercial farming in South Africa is suffering.
Farm security is an issue, with thousands of farmers and their families having been
murdered in recent years. As one commentator recently pointed out, if a similar
number of workers in any other single trade or profession (say, 4 000 plumbers, or
4 000 teachers) had been wiped out in the same number of years you can be damn
sure there would have been a vigorous official response.
The drought this year has also not made farming any easier, but the real problem is the
low prices paid to farmers for their efforts, particularly when viewed against the high
prices paid by consumers at the other end of the food chain. The processors and
retailers have got the food industry by the shorts, to the detriment of both consumers
and the primary producers.
Finally, dumped imports from producers in countries that enjoy huge government
subsidies mean that South African farmers are playing on a distinctly unlevel field.
All of this plays a role in the question of individual, local and national food security, or
the ability of families, regions and the nation at large to feed itself.
Leaving aside the political merits of the ANC-led land reform programme, will the
emergence of a large new class of smallholder farmer help in the fight for food security?
The answer is yes. And no.
At a family and even a regional level, the emergence of large numbers of people
growing their own food should indeed ensure plentiful supply, or at least the absence
of hunger, at a family and even a local level.
For if the idea works, for many ~ and let's be blunt here ~ peasant farmers, the ability
to grow and sell produce and livestock is the first step to a better and more prosperous
life. The key however, is in the word “ability”, which implies both the will, and the
knowledge and skills, to do so. At some stage the government will realise that merely
rehoming families on newly-expropriated land does not constitute the development of
a new class of smallholder farmer. It only means you have created a new class of
homeowner, namely one whose home includes a tract of land.
Cynics might even argue that the desire by government to vigorously pursue its policy
of creating a smallholder class of landowner is nothing more than social engineering
aimed at deflecting attention away from the fact that it ~ government ~ has no
workable plan to tackle unemployment by enabling an economic environment that
creates sustainable, profitable, private-sector jobs.
To turn a homeowner with land into a productive small farmer requires training and
education, access to cheap finance for the acquisition of movable assets such as
tractors, irrigation equipment