Where are all the farmers?

‘Maybe it was the stress of the land claim, but the cancer spread like wildfire and when he died his brother just wanted to get out of farming. He went to start a business in Ballito and now I manage his [100ha] farm. That’s four farms I run now.”

So says Preggie Naicker, a sugar-cane farmer in Doringkop, outside KwaDukuza on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast. His eyes betray a life of early mornings and late, sometimes sleepless, nights. All four of the farms he manages are under land claim and Naicker has been forced to play a waiting game as the process drags on.

Together with his neighbour’s 100ha, there is his own 150ha farm to run, plus the 50ha previously owned by his father and uncle — who was murdered in a 2002 farm robbery — and another neighbour’s 120ha.

This scenario is not uncommon along the cane belt, and such experiences go to the heart of the nationwide skills crisis in the agricultural sector. According to figures recently released by the labour department, South Africa is short of more than 400 000 farmers and farm workers — the biggest shortage in any sector by far.

This figure is all the more alarming when set against growing concerns about South Africa’s food security in light of global shortages and the escalating prices of basic foodstuffs. According to Finance Minister Trevor Manuel the food component of the consumer price index has increased 14% in the past year.

At the recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meeting in Washington Manuel called for a return to traditional subsistence farming and urged South Africans to cultivate crops and livestock for food production on all available arable land.

While this may help stave off -hunger in rural and peri-urban areas, the labour department figures suggest that urgent policy attention is required to address what appears to be a mass exodus from the commercial farming sector.

There is a shortage of 102 670 crop farmers in the country, 150 000 mixed crop and livestock farmers and almost 220 000 farm workers. The scale of these ‘missing” skills raises the question: for how long can we continue to feed ourselves?

Farmers across the country cite a range of reasons for declining production and the steady loss of their peers and an available labour pool. Some fear for their personal safety; fewer young people consider farming a sound career option; drawn out land claims cause insecurity and fallow fields; worker evictions by new owners are rife, and rising world prices for fuel, fertiliser and feed have slashed farmers’ profits. All in all, commercial farming — especially on a small to medium scale — has become increasingly unattractive, even unviable.

‘Global and local economic factors mean it’s harder to achieve economies of scale because your cost per unit is not really decreasing if you increase production,” says Robin Barnsley, a poultry farmer and president of the KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union (Kwanalu).

Barnsley says there’s been a dramatic downturn in the number of farmers in KwaZulu-Natal over the past 10 years: ‘The Statistics South Africa agricultural census of 2002 showed a decrease in KwaZulu-Natal from about 6 000 to 4 500 farmers from 1997 to 2002. We’re waiting on the new census but, from experience, I have no doubt that that trend has continued,” he says.

Subtropical Limpopo, known as the country’s ‘fruit basket”, has lost more than 80% of its farmers in a decade; 90% of farms in the province are under land claim. In the province’s fertile Levubu valley, where all the farms are under claim, production has decreased dramatically in the past three years — from 300 tons a week to 60.

The government’s stuttering land reform programme has created huge uncertainty among farmers: claims unresolved for several years deter farmers from expansion programmes and banks do not accept farms that have been gazetted for a land claim as collateral for loans. The longer a land claim hangs in limbo, the greater the tensions — that sometimes spill over into to intimidation and violence — between farmers and claimants. Once a financial settlement has been agreed on, payment from government can be grindingly slow to materialise.

Six years after agreeing on a price with the Land Claims Commission for her 5 400ha mixed crop and cattle farm in Levubu, Limpopo, Stella Oosthuizen is still waiting for some of the money. ‘We settled on R15-million in 2002, but only got paid a portion in 2006. We are still waiting for the outstanding R2,2-million.”

Production on Oosthuizen’s farm stopped in 2006. Now she merely patrols it for poaching and vandalism: ‘I cleared about 350 telephone wire-traps set for wild buck in the past two weeks,” she says.

Oosthuizen’s former business partner and brother, John Roux, emigrated to New Zealand in 2005, and Oosthuizen is considering moving there to help him set up a new cattle farm.

The Limpopo chairperson of AgriSA’s land affairs committee, Theo de Jager, says Limpopo has been especially hard hit by the agricultural skills exodus, and estimates that almost 84% of the original farmers have left and just 7% of those who remain continue to farm full time.

A recently released Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE) report was scathing about government’s land reform programme. The CDE report found that at least 50% of land reform projects were ‘abject failures” and established that of the 80 000 validated land claims in 2006 (81% for urban land and 19% for rural land) at least 90% were settled by the end of 2007 — mainly in urban areas. The remaining 5 000-plus, mainly in rural areas, were the most complex, some spanning thousands of hectares and under claim by more than one group of people.

The CDE report noted the snail’s pace of reform: in the past three years, the proportion of black-owned agricultural land has increased from 4,3% to 4,7% — which makes prospects for the government’s aim to deliver 30% of South Africa’s agricultural land into black hands by 2014 look remote.

So, where are all these farmers going to?

Some, from Limpopo, have ­relocated to Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape, where there are fewer land claims.

Some, like Oosthuizen, are considering moving to countries like Australia and New Zealand, while others look closer to home: ‘The Mozambique government looks after the interests of the farmer,” says Arne Verster, owner of Harmony farm in Gravelotte near Tzaneen.

Verster says Mozambique is in need of food security and experienced South African farmers are lured to the country, where there is ‘more than enough fruitful soil and water, no restricting laws such as minimum wage and where they see a future for themselves”.

Fritz Ahrens, a neighbouring sub-tropical fruit farmer, agrees. ‘If I have the opportunity, why wouldn’t I go to Mozambique where the government would give me 1 000ha of land for free?”

In KwaZulu-Natal where, according to the South African Cane Growers Association, 50% of agricultural land is under claim, with only 4% settled, farmers with unsettled claims hanging over their heads are looking outside the country, or thinking about businesses in the cities.

‘I love farming, but the stress of the unsettled claim and the intimidation I was suffering just became too much, so I left and started a business near Durban,” says one sugar-cane farmer who did not wish to be identified.

‘I’d settled on a 70%-30% land split with the claimants, but the Land Claims Commission assured them that they could get the full 100% so this thing has just dragged on and now 515ha is lying fallow.”

Hendrik Grobbelaar farmed in Levubu for 18 years, but moved to Pretoria two years ago after his farm’s land claim was settled. He is currently a freelance photographer for a company that draws up maps.

‘It is difficult for the farmers who move to the city to find work,” says Grobbelaar.

‘It is hard to adapt to the limited space in the city. I miss walking on the farm and I miss the weather. The cost of living here is also a lot more expensive. Even though I miss farming I will never go back.”

Mozambique farmer incentives may beckon, but Arne Verster says he’ll hold out here as long as he can.

‘Farming is all I know,” he shrugs, ‘Who is going to give me another job?”

Additional reporting by Yolandi Groenewald, Sello S Alcock and Surika van Schalkwyk