Opinion

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.

Global opportunities are opening up for South African vegetable producers and exporters with the emergence of new markets in some Asian and African countries. This is due to an increase in middle-income earners, says Ezra Steenkamp, deputy director of international trade research at the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

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 large body of literature claims that where there is a lack of food, conflict is bound to increase as people battle over limited resources. However, researcher Ore Koren suggests quite the opposite, saying that conflict is likely to increase when food sources are abundant.

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.

The circulation of illicit arms has made cattle rustling more violent and harmful. East Africa has lessons to share on prevention, say Duncan E Omondi Gumba and Nelson Alusala of the Institute for Security Studies Africa.

A new study that looks at the water competition between cities and agriculture has found that urban water demand in 482 of the world’s largest cities will increase by 80% by 2050, leading to an acute urban surface-water deficit. However, the study also discovered that in certain instances, even a 10% increase in irrigation water-use efficiency can help to overcome urban surface-water deficits.

In the past few weeks I have travelled to a number of countries and met journalists, farmers and agribusiness professionals from all over the world.

I have often wondered, while listening to presentations given at conferences by agricultural economists, whether these learned men and women would make the best or worst farmers.

As part of an in-house project to look at how Farmer’s Weekly has evolved over the past 107 years, a couple of colleagues and I recently visited the National Library in Pretoria to page through the magazine’s archives.

While common across South Africa, goats remain a largely untapped resource for poverty alleviation and rural development. But efforts to remedy the situation are being undermined by the widespread theft of goats. Lieutenant Colonel Nicolas Erasmus, provincial commander of the SA Police Service’s KwaZulu-Natal stock theft and endangered species units, examines this issue.

As the saying goes: be careful what you wish for. After the appointment of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of the ANC in December last year, and his subsequent election as president in Parliament in February, South Africans knew that one of his first orders of business would be a cabinet reshuffle.

South Africa is one of those countries in which you rarely have to travel far to witness first-hand the kind of disparity that exists in the supply of food.

While rural development is supposed to be a key focus of the South African government, the state is failing in this obligation. Veteran rural development expert Jimmy Lonsdale believes the private sector should take over this responsibility to ensure that meaningful rural development is achieved as soon as possible.

As a journalist working for Farmer’s Weekly, you regularly get to experience the bumps, cracks, potholes and other obstacles that crowd out the smooth and flat parts of many provincial and regional roads.

Ever since the National Assembly voted to pass a revised motion brought by the EFF to launch a process to change the Constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation, every media platform in South Africa has been awash with stories, comments, opinions and statements from those who support and those who reject the idea, as well as those who have not yet taken a firm stance on the matter.

Now that all the most crucial changes on South Africa’s political landscape have come to pass, we can turn our attention for a moment to those challenges that will not only impact the social and financial welfare of South Africans, but the existence of all life on earth.

Wilful ignorance is when people consciously avoid information. Many studies have documented consumer attitudes toward farm animal welfare, but few have questioned whether people really want to know how farm animals are raised. Prof Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk explored this question in an Internet survey among 1 000 people in the US state of Oklahoma.