The dream of the Eastern Cape becoming the country’s food basket dominated a wide-ranging conference on rural development held at Walter Sisulu University (WSU) two weeks ago.
“The Eastern Cape can feed its population. Careful dedication by partners, relevant policy-making, the implementation of strategies, planning and the commitment of resources, including land, can lead to the realisation of the dream of the Eastern Cape as South Africa’s foodbasket,” said professor Noluthando Luswazi, the director of the university’s Centre for Rural Development, at the conference’s conclusion on October 1.
The conference — the sixth such annual conference held at the university — also heard that the university’s plans to establish a faculty of agriculture and rural development by 2012 were far advanced.
Luswazi told the Mail & Guardian previous conferences had examined international rural development models that had resulted in a positive transformation of livelihoods.
Last year’s conference, for instance, looked at the Finnish and Chinese models of rural development.
“There were also presentations [in 2009] on rural enterprise development in East Africa,” Luswazi said. “This year the conference foregrounded the green revolution in Punjab, India.”
The conference took a critical look at rural development pilot projects in local municipalities.
Luswazi said she doubted whether such pilots had embarked with appropriate research.
Regarding such pilots in Mhlontlo (Eastern Cape) and Giyani (Limpopo), she said only a scientifically systematic evaluation would tell whether a rural development model could emerge from them.
Delegates from countries that included Ghana, India, Canada and Australia praised the conference as a stepping stone for Eastern Cape development.
But they also said South Africa needed to be cautious about what it learned from overseas development models.
“It will not help for [South Africa] to just take a model that worked elsewhere and try to implement it as it is. It has to adapt it to local conditions,” Manjit S Kang, the vice-chancellor of India’s Punjab Agricultural University, said.
Kang said the model that underpinned the famous green revolution had helped the Punjab province become India’s breadbasket.
Punjab had been on the brink of starvation in the 1960s before the green revolution started, he said.
“To help rural development you have to develop agriculture in rural communities because agriculture is by its nature rural,” Kang said.
Professor Kaku Sagary Nokoe of Ghana’s University of Development Studies said that if rural communities were to be empowered, plans to make people competitive and generate their own income needed to be implemented, not only spoken about.
“How do you get this to happen? Government commitment must be clear,” he said.
Dr Tom Thompson from Olds College in Canada emphasised the role WSU could play in educating the surrounding communities.
“The essential thing is that local farmers should move beyond just farming, they should also process their products and make a profit.”