KOMATIEPOORT, SOUTH AFRICA - JULY 08: A woman arrives to work in a sugarcane field near the Kruger National Park on July 8, 2013 in Komatiepoort, South Africa. South Africa is the world's tenth largest producer of sugarcane with growers annually producing an average of 19.9 million tons of sugarcane per year. The participation of black farmers working on sugarcane production is constantly increasing through the development and empowerment of previously disadvantaged people within their communities. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Throughout the history of sugarcane farming in South Africa, black women have faced particular barriers on top of those that usually bar entry to business. In many ways, democracy marked a watershed moment. Legally it opened the doors of opportunity to previously disadvantaged groups including black women, and many of us have taken the chance to pave the way for generations of women after us. But it is a mistake to think that the end of legal discrimination has made it easy for black women to survive the vagaries of the agricultural sector.
Women growers still face difficult odds. Some are legacies of the past that were carried over into the new dispensation. But the most disappointing are those that have been introduced by the government to the detriment of black, women and young canegrowers.
There is no better example of this than the Health Promotion Levy (sugar tax) introduced in 2018. The intention of the levy was to bring down obesity levels in the country. But, although there has been no evidence that it has achieved this objective, the levy has forced producers of sugar-sweetened beverages to switch to sugar alternatives, decreasing the market for locally-produced sugar. This forces South African sugar onto the global sugar market where prices are low because of the scale of production from deep-water countries like Brazil.
This unintended consequence is a serious threat to the government’s recent efforts to advance localisation. Under the Sugar Industry Value Chain Masterplan, the government and sugar industry stakeholders have undertaken to restore 300 000 tonnes of sugar demand to the local market. A policy designed to drop the demand for locally-produced sugar is therefore clearly inconsistent with this objective. It is as important for the success of the masterplan as for the transformation of the industry that Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana scraps the sugar tax in his budget speech this week.
Perhaps no group of industry players has more hanging on Godongwana’s decision in this regard than South Africa’s women small-scale growers.
In my 19 years of growing sugar cane, my business has survived both unforeseeable and systemic crises, including drought, rising input costs and the influx of cheap imports into our domestic market. One would have hoped that, having survived these difficulties, we could look forward to a brighter future. But this has not been so.
Today, some women growers are dealing with the aftermath of the floods in December 2021 that caused personal devastation when their homes were damaged. This was exacerbated by the frost and hail that followed the floods, stopping their cane’s growth. In some cases, this has meant that growers will receive very little income from their crops; in the worst cases, it will mean no income at all. But even where some cane that survived, being forced onto a global market with low prices will impede their ability to recover.
This bleak picture also comes as a bitter blow to growers who have just survived the unrest in July 2021 that saw more than 135 000 tonnes of cane rejected by mills because of damage as a result of arson. We had hoped to use the financial grants from the Industrial Development Corporation to revive our operations only to be hit with this fresh wave of weather-related problems.
Now, the picture is not all doom and gloom. As a member of SA Canegrowers, I can attest to the support that women growers receive from the organisation. And the commitment by the industry of R1-billion of transformation funding in five years is invaluable for women growers. In addition, the financial assistance in the aftermath of the July riots was a result of SA Canegrowers determined advocacy for the industry.
More recently, the establishment of the Vukani Women Secondary Cooperative will be vital to address the more systemic, long-term barriers that women growers still face, and the policy measures such as the sugar tax that exacerbate their vulnerability.
Too many women canegrowers still farm on communal land or land they otherwise do not own. This means that they lack a vital asset to leverage for capital. This is a barrier to entering the industry and it also makes it significantly harder to stay operational. Agriculture is a cyclical industry that is especially susceptible to unforeseeable events like adverse weather. In seasons where these random misfortunes wipe out our crops, or low market prices result in losses, women need access to working capital to sustain their livelihoods.
Scrapping the sugar tax is a far simpler intervention than land reform and would make a meaningful difference in women growers’ lives. It would go a long way to restoring local sugar demand, enabling women growers to earn more money locally rather than competing on an oversupplied global market. This in turn will allow women to build up reserve funds that they can rely on in the absence of support from financial institutions. Scrapping the sugar tax, then, is the key to the financial sustainability of women’s cane growing operations.
Moreover, with the extra revenue the state is enjoying as a result of high commodity prices, the revenue lost by scrapping the sugar tax will not adversely affect South Africans at all. Rather, scrapping the tax will help the country not only financially as the industry recovers and grows, but also in terms of health.
Finally, scrapping the sugar tax will buy the government time to initiate research to determine the actual causes of rising obesity without compromising the one million livelihoods the sugar industry supports in the interim. It will also allow the country to create a holistic intervention plan that does not scapegoat one industry. In the process, it will create an enabling environment for the sugar industry to recover, for the masterplan to succeed, and for South Africa’s women growers to build sustainable, growing, job creating businesses in the rural communities that need economic opportunities most.