Decline in crop farming costing SA

OVER half a million households in the former homelands disengaged from farming between 2011 and 2016, according to Statistics South Africa. This represents a loss of one in five crop farming households.

The high number of households abandoning crop farming is disquieting given the high levels of food insecurity and hunger in the country: one in five people are vulnerable to hunger, and about one-third of children in some provinces suffer chronic malnutrition.

Why would households disengage from field cropping in the face of such high levels of hunger and malnutrition?

We corroborated the picture painted by Statistics South Africa data in our recent synthesis of several studies over the past two decades.

Our studies showed that the planting and cultivation of fields, typically areas larger than 0.5 hectares, has been abandoned on a large-scale. Such a decline in cropping makes rural households, most of whom are poor, more reliant on food purchases, and at the mercy of price hikes. Such food is often of a lower diversity and nutritional quality. Additionally, the decline undermines the household and national food security.

The abandonment of crop farming fields isn’t new. But some researchers have argued that it has accelerated in the past two decades. Irrespective, one wonders what might be the causes of such a loss of skills, knowledge, labour and land out of cropping.

The answer is that there is unlikely to be a single cause. The interplay of specific drivers behind the change varies from place to place. These include: insufficient funds to buy inputs; increasing incomes from other sources (mostly social grants), making it possible to buy food from shops;

environmental change such as climate change;

recurring damage to crops by livestock that are not herded because children are in school;

socio-cultural change, such as a decline in patriarchy, with many female-headed households, and youth who do not wish to follow in their father’s footsteps.

aspirations for urban livelihoods leading to some young people not seeing a future in farming; and

inadequate direct and policy support from the government.

Understanding the contributions of these causes can contribute towards more informed decision-making about farming at local and national levels.

The effects and implications of the change are also worth examining. These span social, economic and ecological spheres.

Socially, there is loss of identity as farming communities. That’s because more young people increasingly aspire to a future in less physically demanding, and more financially rewarding jobs. The decline of field cropping means that the people who used to work the fields are either now unemployed or have moved to other sectors.

Another consequence is that food security may be compromised.

Economically, idle arable land jeopardises national food security and requires increases in food imports.

Ecologically, there may be both pros and cons. Abandoned fields provide other products, such as firewood, that are useful to local communities or general society. But such changes will also alter fire regimes and make some old fields susceptible to invasive species.

Only a small proportion of households in the former homelands are full-time farmers. This number is declining.

There is a clear need to understand this ongoing decline in crop farming.