OPINION: ‘Agricultural budget does not support commercial farming’
Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa says it is tough for commercial farmers to stay positive when the state shows little interest in supporting them.
• Bennie van Zyl, general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa (TLU SA) writes:
The Minister of Agriculture’s budget for the next year is once again focused, wrongly, more on the development of subsistence farmers rather than on supporting commercial farmers. It is not subsistence farmers who put food on the table of most South Africans but commercial farmers.
Also read: Budget Speech 2023: ‘Agriculture still losing out’ – TLU SA
Although the Minister believes that this budget will allow the department and industry to “continue to meet the country’s food security needs,” she also mentions that only 9% of agricultural exports are produced by emerging farmers. Nowhere in her address did she refer to how commercial farmers, who have been growing food for years and generations, are being successfully assisted.
Also read: Rethinking food systems for South Africa
It is tough for commercial farmers to stay positive when the state shows little interest in supporting them, and mechanisms such as Onderstepoort, which are allegedly supposed to support them, fail even to make vaccines available for sheep and horses.
TLU SA understands that there needs to be an investment in developing new farmers to meet the demand for food and has indeed offered years ago to share knowledge and experience on this matter, but this should not be at the expense of the farmers who are already doing it under challenging conditions.
The investment made to support emerging farmers does not justify their achieved outputs. The department, for example, spent R50 million last year to develop 124 citrus farmers. Yet, they produce only six million of the 128 million boxes of citrus fruit for export.
It would mean far more for the development and sustainability of agriculture if the government focused on assisting commercially profitable farmers instead of “economic restructuring”.
A budget of R17 billion goes only so far. When the bulk is invested wrongly, it places food security in the balance. Given that the policy on agriculture is also wrong, it is obvious that the budget will be spent wrongly. We seriously call on the government to move away from the idea of the so-called economic restructuring and recovery policy and rather focus on the market forces that determine the profitability of commercial farmers – and indeed the availability of food.
