Small farmers down tools
DECLINE: GOVT NEEDS ADDRESS PAST ERRORS
Even though many don’t want to, history and policy provide useful insights.
South African smallholders are abandoning farming. The decline in field cultivation is a problem since many smallholder households struggle to make ends meet. If people were able to produce more of their own food, this would improve their lives.
This article draws on work reported in three papers published in the journals Geoforum, Agrekon and Journal of Rural Studies. It is based on research I undertook in villages in OR Tambo District, Eastern Cape, between 2006 and 2020, two household surveys from 2008 and 2020, and perspectives from South African history.
In the villages where my research is located, the number of fields in cultivation declined from 50% of fields in 2008 to 15% in 2019. This is representative of what can be seen in several South African smallholder communities today.
For the past 20 years, there have been repeated government interventions to support farming, but despite this, fewer farmers plant their fields now than 15 years ago when I started my research.
I argue that important reasons for this can be traced to the displacement of smallholder farmers during the colonial and apartheid eras and inappropriate technical support. To reverse the trend of declining field cultivation, government policies need to address the errors of the past.
History of smallholder agriculture
For over 100 years, SA’s colonial and apartheid regimes systematically undermined smallholder agriculture. By drastically limiting access to land, the regimes prevented the black majority population from surviving on agriculture alone.
This ensured cheap labour for mines and settler farms while leading to overcrowding and land degradation in the “homelands” set aside for black people.
In addition, two key events had a negative impact on farming in the villages I studied: “betterment” and cattle deaths.
Betterment is the term for government attempts to reduce land degradation and increase government control over land use in the homelands. It started in the studied villages in 1957, nine years after the introduction of apartheid in 1948.
Homesteads previously spread out over the landscape were demolished and forcibly relocated. People lost years of investments in infrastructure and soil improvements, while social ties important for the mobilisation of farm labour were weakened.
Another major blow to farming was cattle deaths. While cattle numbers started declining in the 19th century, a great many cattle also died in the late 1970s and early 1980s due to drought. The simultaneous loss of cattle and urban jobs caused a downturn in farming and made it impossible for most households to purchase new animals.
Smallholder farming today
Today, as a result of past legacies, households mainly rely on other forms of income than farming. This is unlikely to change completely. Most rural residents in the villages where I have worked do not see farming as their future main occupation, but they still value part-time farming as important for food security. In this, they face constraints that government interventions have not addressed.
The past decline in cattle numbers means that the stock of cattle in the community is now too small to support farming adequately.
Government-sponsored programmes in the past 20 years have aimed to reverse the decline in agricultural engagement, mainly by subsidising fertilizers and genetically modified or hybrid maize seeds. The assumption is that these inputs are the key to increased agricultural production.
But the new seeds cannot be replanted or legally shared, so people must buy them every year. This undermines the way households help each other with seeds.
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