Opinion

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.

Since land ownership, and agricultural land ownership in particular, remains one of South Africa’s most contentious issues, we should ideally have clear, independent and accurate data available to inform any policy decisions about how best to distribute and utilise land.

It’s a feeling anyone who has grown up on a farm knows well: the excruciating helplessness of looking out over your parched veld or crops and watching rain fall from heavy clouds in the distance, on another family’s farm.

In poorer nations, buying the ingredients for a single meal can use up a significant portion of a person’s earnings. Where there is conflict or economic collapse, it can exceed these earnings outright. Researchers involved with the World Food Programme propose what should be done to ensure true food security.

Try to think back, and ask yourself if two years ago you would have believed that a global first-class city would run out of water, or that a US president would openly make jokes about nuclear warfare or be overtly racist, and not only get away with it, but embolden his millions of supporters in doing so. I would not have believed it!

Claims have emerged that institutions such as the World Bank are ‘doctoring’ the methods they use to measure food security, competitiveness and other factors in developing countries.

The general feeling of relief that South Africa’s business community may have felt when it was announced that Cyril Ramaphosa had won the ANC leadership race was short-lived for those in agriculture.

It’s not only farmers who have to adapt to the fundamental changes occurring in world agriculture, or go out of business. Agricultural economists also have to adapt. This is the warning from Bongiswa Matoti, president of the Agricultural Economists’ Association of South Africa.

At the end of last year, two reports were published that exposed findings so disturbing that if this knowledge does not spur South Africans into action to save the country’s future, I doubt anything will.

In his BCom Hons research paper, Mlungisi Mama examines why so few black youths are interested in agriculture as a career. His conclusion is that they believe the sector comprises little more than farmers and farmworkers, and are unaware of the job opportunities available in various agricultural disciplines. Rectifying this will demand an education campaign run jointly by several government departments.