Terry Leahy – 2015 (first written 2010)
Download the full article as a PDF now.
Jan Raatz was until recently the Dean of the Agriculture Faculty at the University of Fort Hare in Eastern Cape, South Africa. I met him when I was staying at Alice in 2010. He has pondered the problem of rural poverty and agricultural projects for some time. He gradually came to believe that a key issue is that commercial farming does not provide livelihoods for a great number of people, and uses a lot of land in the process.
The problem of instituting a commercial project to relieve rural poverty in the villages is that villagers do not own a lot of land per person. Consequently any project which attempts to relieve poverty by sharing this resource and providing commercial jobs will run into problems. In a way, it does not matter how much money government throws at providing commercial farming equipment and the latest stock and plant varieties, these problems of land ownership per poor person are unbeatable.
Researching the situation current at the time, Jan looked at the economics of commercial farming as it is being practiced in South Africa.
He started out by assuming that a commercial income would be R20 000 per year. This would be the income necessary to attract someone to agriculture as a full time job. It is about what people can get if they manage to get a typical job outside the village – for example packing supermarket shelves is R18 000 per year. A lot of villagers would have their sights set a lot higher than that. F Jan’s figures on farming or example in 2014 mining jobs were paying R48 000 per year (US$4,800 per year).
Jan looked at the kind of incomes being made by commercial farmers and the amount of land or livestock they needed to own to make those incomes. Then he worked out what amount of land or livestock you would need to make R20 000 per year. His view was that village farmers would not be as efficient as these middle class well-educated commercial farmers, so he doubled these figures. But as we shall see, it does not make that much difference to his argument if we assume they are equally efficient. He concluded that to make R20 000 a year, a poor villager would need:
80 sheep
OR
90 goats
OR
40 head of cattle
OR
1.3 ha under irrigation
OR
25 ha of dry land agriculture – on which you have to produce 6 tonnes per hectare.
When you look at the rural villages in South Africa, there is no way that villagers have (on average) this kind of ownership of land and livestock. A more typical holding of cropping land for a village family of six is one or two hectares, which they use for dry land agriculture. The production is usually about one tonne per hectare, not six tonnes per hectare. In addition, the more wealthy half of the village households usually own about one or two head of cattle or 5 goats. It is only a few rich village families that own more livestock (20 or more). Up to half of the village families do not have any large livestock. It is not just a matter of giving poor villagers more livestock. Even now, village grazing lands are quite degraded from grazing pressure. If every village adult was to be issued 40, or even 20 head of cattle, these animals would all just die of starvation and turn the pasture into a barren desert. Irrigated agriculture is more feasible in terms of land availability, but the problem is the cost of providing a substantial number of villagers with the necessary water supply. This is not something governments or NGOs are likely to do.
So it is very hard to see how a commercial strategy using village land could provide an income, even a fairly basic income, for most villagers. The most likely outcome of projects to commercialize village agriculture is that they will fail, as villagers come to realize that the promises of a commercial income are merely promises. Alternatively a successful project will monopolize government resources and some village land to make money for a few.
On the other hand, it is easy to see how a subsistence strategy could actually provide food for villagers. The one or two hectares and the home stand that villagers own could be used to provide the vast bulk of food for the year, making use of poultry to provide animal protein. Ultimately, some of the land now used for grazing and monopolized by the wealthier section of the village community could be turned into woodlots or parcelled out as cropping land to the poorest families.
What Jan suggested as the solution to this problem was that villagers be joined together in a cooperative to use the latest commercial equipment to add value to their meagre farming output. By doing this, they could move further up the value chain and capture some of the profits of the food industry that the farmer does not usually receive. This was the logic behind the Agri-Park project at the University of Fort Hare that Jan initiated. Villagers would use their own small plots of land to grow vegetables. A processing plant would be set up to dry vegetables and make soups in packets. The government was expected to come to the party by contracting Agri-Park to supply these local products for school lunch programs. In chapter four I will call this kind of project a “managed business project” because it depends on the professional and managerial expertise being provided by a cadre of experts appointed by the project. In this case, these experts were to be members of staff at the university. The university would oversee the project and make sure the profits really did flow through to village farmers.
There were some initial successes. The project commandeered some land at the university to pioneer the vegetable growing and established a small processing plant that dried and packaged these vegetables. In the longer term, the Agri-Park project succumbed to some fairly typical problems. One was that the department of education did not adopt the project and favour Agri-Park products. Instead, schools were required to take quotes and give contracts to those who looked good on paper. Agri-Park was not given priority. A second problem was that the Agri-Park project depended upon the university staff in agriculture and other departments running the project and “managing” the business. Jan himself retired and no other staff were available who were passionate about making the project a success. Finally, it was difficult to expand the project at the village level. The kinds of vegetables that the project had to grow to be a commercial success are all vegetables that require irrigation in the conditions obtaining in Eastern Cape. To finance this kind of irrigation for the arm of the project operating in the village gardens and cropping fields it was necessary to have even further government funding and support. This was not forthcoming.