Farmers plan to increase the area under canola to 166 500 hectares this 2025-26 season. Photo: Marco Longari/Getty Images
On the sunny morning of 5 April 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic had provided a breather following a sharp wave of infection, I drove from my office at the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa in Pretoria to a farm in Bronkhorstspruit.
Bronkhorstspruit is a small town of roughly 3 720 people, located 50 kilometres east of Pretoria in Gauteng.
I was on a visit to Gift Mafuleka’s farm. Gift is a young, black commercial farmer who hails from the Esikhawini region of Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. He started farming commercially in Bronkhorstspruit after a successful stint at McCain Foods South Africa, where he had progressed to crop manager on one of its farms.
After he left McCain to start his own enterprise, he leased a farm from the government, which it had obtained from private owners for the purpose of land reform — known as Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy farms, one of the land redistribution strategies introduced in 2006. The farms acquired in this manner are not transferred to black land reform beneficiaries; instead, they are given non-tradable short-term leases, while the ownership of the land remains with the government.
These leases typically vary from five to 30 years, followed by the option to transfer ownership, which seldom happens.
This timeframe in itself is frightening, as it suggests that if one receives a lease at age 30, one might have an option to buy the land at the age of 60 — this in a country where World Bank data suggest that life expectancy was 64 in 2019.
This means a person can farm their whole life without ever feeling ownership and making a tangible investment in a farm under legislative arrangements such as the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy. There might be other arguments against this point, but this book is not about land reform, so I won’t dive into this further. Suffice to mention that this method of land reform has many downsides that constrain black farmers, some of which I discussed in my previous book, Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity & Agriculture. The commonly cited challenge is the lack of collateral, which leaves the land reform beneficiaries cash-starved and often causes their farming ventures to fail.
Gift’s story on the day of my visit was a positive one. CNN was shooting a segment for its show, Connecting Africa, with journalist Eleni Giokos showcasing the success of African farmers and the untapped potential in this sector. They chose Gift, in part, to show the success of young black farmers. This is not mentioned in the show, but was told to me by the producers in our conversations after the shoot.
Gift was in the middle of cabbage harvesting, one of various vegetables produced on his roughly 350-hectare farm. My role there was to speak broadly about the untapped agricultural potential and avenues of investment in South Africa’s agriculture and in other parts of the African continent.
The expansion in area of plantings that focus on labour-intensive and high-value agricultural commodities and investment in various value chains were some of the issues we discussed, along with opportunities for agricultural input providers.
After everyone had left, I sat down with Gift to chat about agricultural conditions, which in his case were positive because South Africa received a lot of rain in the 2020-21 summer season. Gift was curious to know about the agricultural policy discussions in Pretoria and what we thought would improve the participation of black farmers in commercial agriculture.
After all, as of 2022, black farmers have produced between 5% and 10% of total agricultural output in South Africa. What Gift was essentially asking about were the practical means of confronting the dualism that exists in South Africa’s agricultural sector, while simultaneously ensuring the growth and sustainability of the sector.
The poor and slow implementation of land reform, inefficient government decisions and support systems, poorly structured financial support, bureaucratic delays, drought and diseases have all entrenched the divide between commercial agriculture (mainly white) and subsistence farming (mainly black).
Indeed, at the dawn of democracy, few people probably thought that South Africa would still be battling with the phenomenon of “two agricultures” — or dualism — nearly three decades on. Although some progress has been made, as black farmers have joined commercial production and supply chains, the numbers are still disappointing, at less than 10%.
Admittedly there are commodities in which the inclusion of black farmers is much better than others. A case in point is the wool industry, tomato production and cattle, where black farmers’ contribution is more than 9%. There has been a deliberate effort by both the private sector and government to jointly support black farmers in these commodities; hence their inclusion at the commercial level is notable.
I should also emphasise, however, that this is at best a guesstimate and hides the amazing progress in maize production, wool production, commercial beef output (where black farmers are responsible for a substantial share of 34%), and some horticultural products.
In addition, the numbers also do not consider transactions in informal value chains and sales in small local markets. This is because the reported shares are largely extracted from records provided by the commodity organisations as part of their commitment to transformation.
The incomplete picture is also a result of how the agricultural census conducted by Statistics South Africa was done by only including VAT-registered farmers.
The 2017 agricultural census excluded the 92 634 households that practised commercial farming as their main source of income,
and a further 122 200 households that practised commercial farming as a secondary source of income (these are estimates from Statistics South Africa’s Community Survey of 2016).
Therefore, one can assume that about 214 800 farming households (black and white) who practise some forms of commercial farming were excluded from the agricultural census.
Most of these are micro-enterprises with gross farm incomes below R500 000 a year, but still are commercial since they sell produce.
A Country of Two Agricultures, by Wandile Sihlobo, is published by Tracey McDonald Publishers and is available in all good bookstores with a recommended retail price of R280.
Wandile Sihlobo is chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, author of Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity, and Agriculture and visiting research fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of
Governance.