From bread basket to basket case...

While the focus has been on the Covid-19 crisis, farm attacks have been increasing – and they pose a serious threat to the long-term security of South Africa. Last month, there were 27 attacks on farmers which, says Tommie Esterhuyse, chair of Agri SA’s Centre of Excellence: Rural Safety, were “brutal and senseless” and have “deeply affected” the national agricultural community.

Just yesterday, news emerged that Julian Stobbs, a well-known activist for the legalisation of cannabis, was murdered during a robbery at his smallholding and business at Lanseria, north of Joburg.

These attacks have, seemingly, been ignored by President Cyril Ramaphosa, prompting Democratic Alliance MP Dianne Kohler Barnard to say there had been “no possible solutions tabled, no campaigns launched to ensure the safety of those living in rural areas or engagement with them”.

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald had a more ominous assessment of the silence from the president, saying: “It appears the president dare not ask that farmers be protected against crime because then he will also have to ask that farmers’ property must be protected. That contradicts the policy of land expropriation without compensation.”

While the situation is still a long way from what rightwingers are calling a “white genocide”, it must surely worry government that such a key part of our economy as agriculture is being subjected to such terror.

Farmers are our food source and an important stabilising factor in rural communities. That is why they deserve special treatment – not because they are, largely, white … though even that is changing these days.

Mess with your farmers and your country will go quickly from being a bread basket to a basket case. Look at Zimbabwe.