Letter from the editor

Sometimes I think that if we could only somehow bottle the eternal optimism of the average South African, the profit we’d make would be enough to solve the country’s economic troubles.

The land debate has been dominating headlines in South Africa since December last year, and in the run-up to the national election in 2019, every politician hoping to win a seat in Parliament has expressed an opinion on the matter.

On the rare occasions when I manage to escape the city early enough on a Friday to drive the 450km from my office in Johannesburg to the farm where I grew up in northern KwaZulu-Natal, I usually pass through Ermelo on the town’s severely battered and potholed main road.

Transformation in the farming sector, or any other sector, has not failed because too little effort and money have been invested in it.

Let me start by apologising to all the civil servants working for the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), those hard-working citizens who show up at the office every day with an honest intention to contribute in some way to the future of the agriculture sector in South Africa.

This week we celebrate National Women’s Day in South Africa, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to say to, and about women in agriculture, to commemorate this day.

I am still busy processing the vast amount of ideas and information that were shared by the speakers and other participants at the 12th Agribusiness Africa Conference, hosted by Farmer’s Weekly in Johannesburg.

Chris Clayton, a journalist from the US whom I met at a conference in Argentina about five years ago, recently wrote a column about a study on the rate of farmer suicides in the US.

After reading the report ‘Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in South Africa’, which was published earlier this year by the World Bank, I started wondering whether we have begun taking for granted that growing the agriculture sector would be an effective way to create jobs in Africa.

For some farmers, this might be easier said than done, but to make a living from farming in the future you will either have to go big or be unique.

The biggest story coming out of the recent Group of Seven (G7) summit in Canada is the heckling by US President Donald Trump on Twitter, which was directed at other member countries of the G7, and Canada in particular.

A friend I met through our mutual interest in farming recently introduced me to the book Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future, compiled by the US’s Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture.