How to start turning Eastern Cape into a breadbasket

In 2024 SA will celebrate 30 years as a democracy.

This celebration will coincide with South Africans going to the polls to elect a new government.

When South Africans finally achieved universal suffrage regardless of race and gender, millions of black people residing in townships and rural villages expected to be integrated into the mainstream economy.

Many of these people had not only been restricted from participating meaningfully in the formal economy up to then, but their parents and ancestors had been victims of land dispossessions during the colonial and apartheid eras.

It therefore came as no surprise that these people embraced the BEE and land reform policies that were introduced to address the legacy of their economic disempowerment.

However, the disproportionate emphasis on these policies, and in many instances their poor implementation, has had unintended consequences, among them that the development of township entrepreneurs and rural farmers has lagged.

In many parts of SA communal or subsistence farming practised on tribal land has been severely neglected, while township economies are dominated by immigrants and large companies due to underinvestment in local entrepreneurs.

The plight of communal farmers rarely makes news headlines, which are mainly dominated by the failure of land reform policy and hotly contested debates about whether land expropriation without compensation is good or bad for the future SA economy.

Land expropriation without compensation has dominated national discourse after the government failed to meet its target of redistributing 30% of land to black people by the 2014 deadline. Only 6.78% of commercial farmland was returned to its original owners by then.

However, research has shown that 70%-90% of these farms are no longer productive because most of the resettled people had no experience in commercial farming and did not receive post-settlement support.

In pre-1994 SA black people had access to 12.1% of the country’s land, with 7.8% set aside for blacks living in the so-called homelands. I grew up in one of the homelands, Transkei, which was incorporated into the Eastern Cape province after 1994.

In the Transkei, communal farming was practised on 84.3% of the land, and in Ciskei, another former homeland incorporated into the Eastern Cape, on 74% of the land, leaving little room for commercial, marketorientated agriculture. In both former homelands communal farming is in a far worse state than before democracy due to underinvestment and poor infrastructure.

The former Transkei has always been considered a potential breadbasket capable of feeding the entire Southern Africa, but it is now a food importer that is underutilising or wasting its arable land.

This is despite the area having more than 60,000ha of land suitable for crop farming and 300,000ha for dryland cropping. It also has 25,000ha of potentially irrigable land and 3.5-million hectares of grazing land.

In the case of Transkei, the infrastructure that was laid during the implementation of the “betterment” policy between the 1930s and 1950s has collapsed. This policy was implemented to counter land degradation caused by high population density, soil erosion, limited availability of arable land and overgrazing due to farmers accumulating livestock as a store of wealth instead of selling them on the markets.

To address this problem land was subdivided into residential, arable and grazing commonages.

Villages were supported with the necessary infrastructure, which included construction of roads, dams, boreholes for the provision of water to people and livestock, and the erection of fences to separate residential, arable and grazing land.

Today, if you drive around Transkei, you will notice that fences have either been stolen or vandalised, making crop farming impractical due to the risk of livestock destroying crops. As a result, many unfenced fields are barren or fallow, leaving communal farmers with only the option of growing crops in their fenced home gardens.

The other major hurdle that faces communal farmers is that the land they occupy is controlled by tribal chiefs. Because these farmers have no title deeds they cannot put their land up as collateral to access loans to finance crop and livestock farming.

Furthermore, communal farming receives minimal support from the government and some farmers have for decades relied on migrant wage remittances from family members working in big cities to stay afloat.

But since the 1990s the contribution of remittances to rural household incomes has declined significantly due to job losses in the mining and manufacturing sectors, resulting in greater dependence of families on social welfare.

In the 1980s the then Transkei government tried to boost and modernise maize production by communal farmers using the now defunct parastatal the Transkei Agricultural Corporation (Tracor) as a vehicle.

Through Tracor farmers were encouraged to buy production packages consisting of a tractor service, chemical fertilisers, hybrid seed and chemicals for plant protection. Following the demise of Tracor, tractor services for soil preparation are now offered by private entrepreneurs, who do not have enough tractors to meet demand.

The responsibility of supporting communal and commercial farmers now lies with the Eastern Cape department of rural development & agrarian reform, which is not doing enough to stimulate agriculture in the province.

The department, which plans to establish mechanisation centres for farmers to access tractors, has helped communal farmers cultivate crops on only 221ha of land. This assistance is underwhelming considering that the average size of a commercial farm in the Eastern Cape is 250ha. The province is a long way from fulfilling its potential as a breadbasket.

For this potential to be realised the provincial government must step up, and communal farmers need a change of mindset. They must begin producing for market instead of accumulating livestock for bridal payments, slaughtering animals for family rituals, and selling cattle and sheep only to raise cash for emergencies.