Job creation lies in high-value farming
Adviser says support for horticulture could employ 300,000 workers
As many as 300,000 new jobs in agriculture are “hiding in plain sight” if the government could provide the right support to farmers to grow the right products, says a top adviser to the department of trade and industry.
As many as 300,000 new jobs in agriculture are “hiding in plain sight” if the government could provide the right support to farmers to grow the right products, says a top adviser to the department of trade & industry in a paper published this week.
Nimrod Zalk, an adviser to the department and formerly a top official for many years, says that SA needs to turn its attention to high-value horticulture such as the cultivation of fresh flowers, tomatoes, carrots, cherries, strawberries and avocados, among other fruit and vegetables that are highly labour intensive and for which global demand is growing.
Employment in agriculture could be expanded by 25%.
“As SA searches for interventions that could generate largescale employment, effect structural and racial transformation and grow exports, a fundamental opportunity to realise these objectives is hiding in plain sight. There is a large-scale but overlooked opportunity to promote the growth of high-value agricultural products that are both labour-intensive and exportoriented,” Zalk wrote in a paper published in his personal capacity on online economics forum Econ3X3.
Agriculture in SA is dominated by the cultivation of crops such as maize and wheat, which lend themselves to large-scale cultivation, low labour intensity and mechanisation. Of 10million hectares under cultivation in SA, 9.5-million are for products such as these.
But high-value fruits and vegetables that cannot easily be mechanised are 80 times more labour-intensive than most field crops. This factor rises to 160 times for the most labour-intensive products such as pawpaws, bananas, avocados, tomatoes, flowers and cherries.
But for horticulture to take off in such a way that hundreds of thousands of jobs can be created, it requires co-ordinated policy interventions and support programmes from the state. These include long-term certainty on land reform and longdated loans for farmers because of the amount of time taken to produce fruit; much more expenditure by the state on research & development and public infrastructure, such as irrigation, as well as lower costs and more efficient transport networks and trade diplomacy.
Zalk says he wrote the paper to make people aware “of the compromises and accommodations that are necessary if you are to prioritise employment”.
Apart from agroprocessing, agriculture does not fall under the industrial policy action plans developed by the department of trade & industry.