Politics is getting in the way of food security

Government’s short-sighted attitude towards agriculture is hurting the sector, writes PRINCE

MASHELE

It is only very recently that the public has come to terms with the implications of electricity shortages for us all. In many parts of our country, people are beginning to understand the link between load shedding and water shortages. Even in big cities, taps are now running dry. What is conspicuous by its absence in the public domain is a focus on the impact of load shedding on food security, even though we all can see that our wallets can no longer ll the same food basket they could not long ago.

We have now reached a point where millions of us cannot afford to buy something as basic as food, yet we hear nothing from government in the form of interventions to assist farmers with rising production input costs. If we look deeper into the problem, we see that South Africa’s history and political economy of food production in South Africa have complicated the matter.

A complicated history

Before 1994, the government provided subsidies and technical support (such as research and marketing) to farmers. The support goes back to the creation of the Land Bank in 1912, the establishment of the Farmers Assistance Board in 1925, and a whole range of agricultural support programmes introduced by the apartheid government.

The irony is that the black politicians who met to discontinue agricultural subsidies ate food produced by the same white farmers they decided no longer to support.

The problem is that farmland (especially for commercial purposes) and agricultural subsidies were given only to white farmers, with black people systematically prevented from participating in commercial farming. Black people’s exclusion from land was institutionalised through the Land Act of 1913.

It is South Africa’s long history of racial discrimination in farming that has shaped the attitudes of the ANC-led government that has been in power since 1994. When they ascended to state power, one of the rst things ANC politicians did was to discontinue support for white farmers. The irony is that the black politicians who met to discontinue agricultural subsidies ate food produced by the same white farmers they decided no longer to support.

Indeed, white farmers produced food not only for white people but also for millions of black South Africans. Thus, punishing them also meant making food more expensive for everyone. ANC politicians do not feel the pain since they pay themselves handsome governmental salaries.

Prince Mashele

Land unreformed

Since 1994, the ANC has been trumpeting a new land-reform programme that was meant to redistribute land to black people and provide support to new black farmers. The summary of a very long and complicated story is that the programme has been a disaster.

The ag-bearer of this disaster is the Mala Mala Game Reserve in Mpumalanga. The government bought 65 000 hectares of commercially lucrative game farming land attached to the Kruger National Park in 2014, and handed it to surrounding poor black communities in the name of land restitution.

This is the most expensive of all restitution transactions in South Africa since 1994, costing the state R939 360 000. Go to the rural villages surrounding Mala Mala today and you will nd the so-called bene ciaries as poor as they were before the transaction took place. The whole scheme has descended into factional in ghtings involving thugs and corrupt ANCconnected pseudo-activists.

Most black people who live in different parts of South Africa know of a failed land-restoration scheme near to where they are. At every agricultural industry gathering, there is no shortage of black farmers who are as frustrated as their white counterparts by ANC corruption and lack of government support. Instead of correcting the wrongs of history in agriculture, the ANC has made life dif cult for all farmers today – black and white. These dif culties are felt by all of us ordinary South Africans when we visit our nearest grocery store.

Policies are never evaluated on the basis of their good intentions; they are assessed on outcomes. The question must be: Has the ANC government’s intention to redistribute land to black people and provide support to emerging black farmers produced results? The answer is that nearly 30 years since the ANC came to power, most of South Africa’s fertile commercial land is still in the hands of white people.

What, then, is to be done? The answer requires courage: vote the ANC out, install a new ethical government, reinstate agricultural subsidies and provide targeted state support to black farmers. The goal must be to guarantee food security for all South Africans and make food affordable for poor people.