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These three projects were described by Dr Francois Lategan and the interviews were digitally recorded (in September 2009). The following discussion summarizes the projects and makes some suggestions and comments about their likely impact and prognosis. These ideas are based on my own research (Leahy 2009) which has been in a number of provinces of South Africa (other than Eastern Cape). I have now visited the Eastern Cape and my comments on the Eastern Cape are based on the areas between East London and Mthatha that I observed. I have also inserted some comments on these projects based in my research in Alice and with the University of Fort Hare in 2010. For each project I will begin with sections of the transcript from Dr Lategan’s interview and then add my comments.
The Nguni cattle project
Francois: Nguni cattle are a native breed that has been improved. They are resistant to disease, cope well with drought and are ideal for poor people in communities. This breed is currently the biggest stud bull commercially.
The stage of the project we are carrying out at the moment is the placement of animals. A community is selected after meeting certain criteria. While most cattle are allocated for community grazing areas, there are also some LRAD farms and farms leased from communities that are involved in the project. Once a community or farm is selected, they then receive ten heiffers and two bulls. These are registered animals, selected by the national Nguni cattle breeders’ association.
Prior to these cattle being placed, all the bulls have to be slaughtered or sold. In other words, the intention is to improve the stock by insemination only from certified Nguni bulls. In many communities, cattle are still considered a token of wealth and the larger the herd the better. So we only get involved with a community if they apply to be involved – they have accepted these conditions.
The people who represent the community as leaders are the people they nominate. Can be referred to as a “community development council”. Some communities vote and in others the chief nominates members of the council.
There is a contract between the IDC (a parastatal – the Industrial Development Corporation) and the community. We call it “passing on the gift”. After five years, they should give us back 10 heiffers and 2 bulls. These are selected to be the ones that are descended from the registered heiffers and registered bulls. They ensure that a registered Nguni cow is mated with one of the pure Nguni bulls. The national and provincial clubs of the Nguni association certify these cattle based on ancestry. In other words, the offspring should be registered shortly after birth.
However there is a problem with this procedure in the project. The administrative capacity to effectively register the pure Nguni stock is not present in some cases. Some of these births are never registered. We are working on that. We are going to try and do away with these difficult administrative procedures while protecting the purity of the breed.
Terry: How are these stock allocated to particular people in the village?
Francois: They are allocated to the community as a whole, not to any person. You see, these animals are not allocated to people. They are allocated to a community. They are not allocated to any particular person. You see, we don’t know and we quite frankly are not interested in what happens once … Because the chief and the development committee. They sign surety for those twelve animals. However they manage them inside the community. We are not always sure. Because in some cases it has come to our attention that the chief takes all of those for his own herd. OK. We don’t mind and we don’t interfere in the social dynamics inside the community. Because that is not the purpose of the project.
We could have a problem if the chief monopolizes the bulls. Then there could be a problem because the rest of the herd is not being inseminated.
Terry: How do you make sure all the local bulls have been slaughtered?
Francois: There is a three months window in which they have to carry out this task once they have agreed to the contract. We make use of the services of the extension officers and animal health workers to verify this. They understand the value of an improved herd. It depends on the leadership wanting to make this work. There are some communities where this has fallen apart – for example stud cows have been slaughtered for marriage, funeral, or birth ceremonies. There are others where it just flies.
We have so far signed up 56 villages and we are contractually obliged to sign up 75. There have been 5 or 6 that have “passed on the gift”. The project started in 2004. So this has been the first four years. The obligation continues.
Terry: What is the sanction if they don’t do it?
Francois: It is contractual. They have signed a contract. The chief signs the piece of paper. His success will provide an opportunity for another community to become part of the project. So if his project is successful, he gains status through providing this benefit for another community.
The cost for us to buy these 2 bulls and 10 heiffers is about AUS$11,000 – R75 000. A bull is valued at about R15 000 rands. At present commercial farmers buy Nguni type cattle from communities to strengthen their own stock.
These cattle that are bought are often poor quality because of poor quality grazing.
Terry: So how does the project address the problem of grazing pressure?
Francois: One of the requirements for a community to be accepted is to have adequate grazing. The exension officers make this decision. Many of these farms lack fencing. A requirement of the contract is that the fencing is in place and being maintained. The government funds that through CASP.
Terry: What about LRAD and leasehold sites?
Francois: The requirements are much the same. The project does much better on these sites [than in the community grazing areas]. Better care is taken of the animals and so on.
Terry: What is the benchmark of project success?
Francois: A designed outcome is “passing on the gift”. We do not have a definite target. Just to improve the stock. One sign of success is the amount of dealings going on and the amount of money that is made. We can go to auctions and see what is being sold. They can make a lot of money by selling registered stock. Some of these communities make a lot of money by selling good stock. We want to establish a niche market for Nguni meat – it is low cholesterol and tastes good. But it is hard to do this. Some of the non participating communities have started attending auctions and building their own herd. They have sold some stock to stud breeders. The breeders would get Nguni type animals from community herds and then buy a good bull. Our project has led to more commercial transactions between communities and other graziers.
Communities use cattle in ceremonies. They are slaughtered to be eaten on the spot by guests. Nguni cattle work well in ceremonies because they bellow when killed! Brahmans are not so good because they do not have a good temperament – they run away. The Nguni has a smaller frame but is lighter on the grazing.
The potential is there to build strong commercial herds. We can develop the expectation of wealth creation from these animals.
Comments on the Nguni cattle project
This is in many ways an excellent project. It makes sense to select villages that make an application and then to stipulate that participation is conditional on grazing quality and fencing. This is likely to work well in sifting out communities that just want a free gift without any real intention of making the project work long term. The design of the project is essentially to tempt farmers into a more effective and commercial use of their grazing land and through this to increase cash income to relieve poverty in the villages. A side intention of this project is clearly that grazing pressure will be reduced if more cattle are marketed and less are held on to as a measure of wealth and status. This is likely if prices for the sale of individual cattle increase – as more animals are registered as Nguni, or look more close to Nguni stock, or if animals are in a better condition from the easing of grazing pressure. Ideally these aims can work with each other in a mutually beneficial cycle.
The following are some concerns that may be worth considering.
The requirement that a village slaughters all its bulls and that these replaced with two Nguni registered bulls could be a problem in a number of ways.
Poor villagers rely on very small herds of cattle (as small as 2 or 3 for some households) grazed on community land for various kinds of poverty relief. First is the expense of ceremonies in which meat is distributed to guests. Cattle are hoarded for this non commercial use. The added benefit is a free distribution of animal protein in the community; an important factor in villages where nutrition can be poor and food security is an issue. Secondly, cattle are hoarded because monetary income is likely to be spent, and often spent unwisely, by the heads of households. One or two cattle are a better form of banking and can be sold if there is a sudden and unavoidable financial demand on the household. In this context, it is a problem if what may be quite a large part of the herd is sold or slaughtered all at once. This problem is more likely to be severe for the poorer villagers who may not have a lot of say over whether the project is implemented. The aggravation of social inequality in the village caused by such a policy could well be compounded if effective ownership of the donated Nguni cattle is held by the chief and other members of a village elite. It could well be these people who are marketing registered Nguni stock and getting the financial benefit from this – while most villagers with a small number of stock are keeping their cows and their mixed offspring for the usual subsistence purposes.
The resentment engendered by developments of this kind could sabotage the effectiveness of the project.
- For example, villagers may allow fencing to run down or even steal some of the wire for household use.
- There may be slowness or inefficiency in registering cattle as Nguni.
- Dishonesty in registration of calves as Nguni is also a possibility. In other words, a poor villager might register a calf as coming from a Nguni cow when in reality it comes from a village cow.
- A more likely form of sabotage is that unwanted bulls may be hidden by poorer villagers in neighbouring villages and brought back after the project has been well and truly started.
- Another possibility is that poorer residents may sell their bulls and buy back local cattle from neighbouring villages after the project has been established.
- A common development in rural communities is that projects which are well fenced and intended to create a commercial grazing operation can be placed at some distance from the village while unofficially, many cattle owned by poorer residents are grazed unfenced in the immediate vicinity of the village – meaning that much of the community grazing land has been effectively monopolized by a small elite who wish to pursue commercial grazing while other villagers are continuing to destroy community owned land outside of this project area.
- As indicated in the interview, one way in which the project can fail is that owners kill the registered Nguni cattle for ceremonies without ensuring registered progeny and without making any financial gain from the pure Nguni stock.
Without independent project workers living in villages, it is hard to monitor these kinds of social processes and ensure that it is all working as intended. In other words, the project itself should train, pay and appoint an officer for each village to work with the community on these issues. A team to inspect and consult with villagers would consist of this project officer and a representative from the village council and an agricultural department officer.
As with many projects in South Africa that are designed to relieve rural poverty, the ultimate aim of the project is to relieve poverty by providing an income from commercial farming. A typical problem, which is clearly relevant in this case, is that villagers do not have the financial and administrative skills to make this kind of business operation effective. In this case, there have been problems with getting villagers to effectively register their cattle directly after birth and to ensure that the pure Nguni stock are adequately marked out, so that the maximum commercial benefit can be gained. It could be argued that even if that has not been done, the mixed stock that are the offspring of the Nguni bulls and local cows will still be more marketable as “almost Nguni” stock to be purchased by commercial farmers who wish to improve their herds. Even so, problems of access to markets can be great for village farmers who may not be able to afford trucking to the markets and may not have the financial skills to get a good price at auction. I am not entirely convinced that this mixed stock are worth more at market than the original community herds – most cattle in the villages are already close to the Nguni breed and certainly fetch a good price if they are in good condition. The strategy that improves the worth of village cattle to increase the temptation to sell stock can only work if there is a great increase in the value of cattle – with Nguni and mixed Nguni stock being worth a lot more at market than unimproved cattle. In other words, if prices are not greatly different there is no more incentive to sell cattle than there is at present with unimproved stock.
The second problem with such project designs is that not-for-cash agriculture in the villages is actually a very effective means of poverty relief in situations where some cash income is provided by remittances and pensions. Food produced by households can free up income for other purposes where cash is absolutely necessary. In this case, the fact is that despite decades of attempts to persuade villagers to commercialize their community grazing operations, only a small proportion of these projects have been successful in the long term. Communities persist in the strategy of hoarding cattle, slaughtering them for ceremonies or to deal with financial emergencies – with all the problems of over grazing that are associated with this. The reasons for this perverse behaviour are the ones spelled out above – none of this is particularly surprising given the social and economic context for poor villagers. So, in this case, on the basis of previous experience we might expect that a small proportion of the villagers targeted with this project actually make the jump to commercial grazing. However this may be at the expense of some of the poorer villagers in these communities. At the same time we could expect that many more villagers will see some improvement in their herds but that sales will not increase by a marked extent in the long term. It is certainly true that “passing on the gift” is a good benchmark of this project in indicating the administrative effectiveness of the village council and the intention to become a more commercial operation. It is much too early yet to determine what proportion of the beneficiary communities will attain this benchmark.
Overall, then, I wonder whether this is the best way to be spending money to relieve rural poverty in the Eastern Cape. If, as I believe, it is extremely difficult to shift community grazing into a markedly more commercial framework, a different project design could be more relevant. From the point of view of non commercial grazing, existing herds are quite sufficient and are fairly close to the Nguni breed anyway. The main problem with stock is poor condition due to overgrazing and poor pasture, especially in the dry season. In the areas of the Eastern Cape that I have recently observed, the absence of effective fencing for livestock (including goats) has meant that there is little tree cover. Insufficient firewood for cooking is a huge problem. Unrestricted grazing on village community lands has led to severe problems of soil compaction, erosion and poor pasture quality. Inadequate fencing has also impeded cropping and must be one of the contributors to the decline of large scale cropping in the province. Inadequate fencing and the cost of fencing must also be making it difficult for local householders to grow crops in land around the residential area – a common practice at present.
Two kinds of projects have been designed to deal with overgrazing problems of this kind. Both depend on strong community support and the main cost of such projects is really the cost of agricultural extension and community work to involve all stakeholders and to make binding agreements. The skills needed here are as much those of the human services as they are those of agricultural science! The two projects which I would refer readers to are the Thuo-Boswa LandCare project and the Njeremoto biodiversity project for Holistic grazing management.
The Thuo-Boswa LandCare project was initiated by staff from the provincial department of agriculture. The PDA extension staff talked to the community about the problems connected with overgrazing on their community land. They introduced the concept of internal fencing and rotation of stock, leading to an application for LandCare funding. With rainfall of 350 mm annually in summer, the PDA extension officer estimated the grazing capacity to be 15-20 ha per livestock unit. Two demonstration plots were set up to show how pasture could improve without grazing pressure – measuring 50 x 50 metres in both good and poor veldt condition sites. Livestock were excluded except once a year after the growing season. The aim of these benchmark plots was to “provide an important training tool for the community in demonstrating the effects of implementing a rest in a grazing system” (National Department of Agriculture 2004: 10).
Convinced by these demonstrations, members of the community (24 families) decided to fence their land into 6 paddocks of 300 ha each. The cattle were rotated so that paddocks were rested for 3 months. An increase in desirable perennial grasses showed that the veldt was improving. The community also agreed to a stocking limit of 50 head of cattle per family, with the result that the herd is currently 156 (Holt 2005: 51). The report comments that “this limit is still higher than the grazing capacity of the area” but at least the community shows some understanding of the need to limit numbers of cattle (National Department of Agriculture 2004: 9). Actually, if an appropriate stocking rate is one livestock unit per 20 hectares, the community would need 3 000 hectares for this herd, not the 1 800 that they have. I note that proponents of holistic management believe a much higher stocking rate is possible if cattle are rotated around the pasture according to their proposed regimen (see below).
The Thuo-Boswa project shows the effectiveness of community decision making for a community resource, and also the role of department extension officers in providing information and funding. The solution to numbers of cattle – a limit per family – implies an attempt to reduce inequality in the village. This certainly makes sense as a strategy for poverty relief and sustainable use of resources. Making a change like this has to be seen as a challenge to the power of wealthy cattle owners in the village. This is no easy matter and it is no surprise that they still have some way to go to get to what the agricultural officers beliebe is a sustainable stocking rate.
In a presentation at the International Permaculture Convergence (IPC2009) in Malawi, Osmond Mugweni explained the system of rotational grazing that has been developed for community owned grazing land in Zimbabwe and which follows the theory of holistic management. This strategy has been pioneered by the Fambidzanai Institute in Zimbabwe and by the Njeremoto Biodiversity Institute (2009). This is based on a traditional Shona system of herding. One herder from the village takes the cattle for a seven day period, and this task is rotated following meetings of stakeholders which plan the cattle rotation. The land is divided into three areas with marker stones painted with colour codes to distinguish the three areas. In a given season one third of the land is allocated to cattle grazing and the other two thirds are left to rest. The herders move the cattle around the area allocated for that season. The three seasons are early summer (November to January), late summer (February to April) and the winter dry season (May to October). In the next year all these areas rotate (the area for winter becomes the area for early summer and so on). The outcome is that in any given year one third of the land has no cattle occupation at all during the summer growing period and the other two areas have no cattle in the winter dry season. The advantage of this system is that there is no cost to put internal fencing on village community grazing land to achieve rotational grazing – something which is probably beyond the resources of CASP funding in most cases. The disadvantage is clearly that this system depends on a very tight agreement between farmers, since there is no fencing barrier to remind all concerned of the limits to grazing in a given season.
Both of these strategies could be worth trying in Eastern Cape to deal with what is clearly the most serious issue associated with grazing in the communities at present. What could also be useful is projects to harvest water with bunds; to plant bands of fodder and fuel wood trees on contour; to repair damaged erosion gullies (dongas) with gabions and spreader banks. All of these projects would aid in repairing damaged community grazing lands, infiltrating water and improving pasture quality.
The Dairy Project
Francois: This project is on land that was part of the original university farm. Top [white commercial] dairy producers approached us from the South Coast of South Africa. They come from a high rainfall area and high producing area. They wanted to get involved in a BEE project and felt that the best way to make an impact was through the university. This is a R21 million project. It is a pasture based dairy system similar to that used in New Zealand. There are 250 hectares under irrigation. We have replaced the natural grazing pasture with an introduced pasture irrigated by a circular pivot system spraying water, using ryegrass and a kikuyu mixture. The milking parlour is a 60 cow rotating system. It takes seven minutes for a cow. We milk 800 to 1000 cows twice a day. These farmers have trained a black dairy manager on their systems and he is now responsible for the Fort Hare system. Half the funding is from University of Fort Hare and half from these commercial farmers. This is a business transaction. We provide the land; they provide the cows and there is a 50/50 profit sharing. The BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) aspect is employment of blacks and their idea is to extend this system to the villages surrounding Fort Hare. They have put in two more dairies like this within a 50 km radius of Fort Hare. They have relationships with these communities. The communities will provide the land and there will be a profit sharing agreement between the community and the investors.
They use fertilisers on this pasture (nitrogen, potassium) and also spread a lot of chicken manure.
At Fort Hare the water comes from a government dam and is guaranteed to the university.
At Fort Hare, six women provide the labour in the dairy. There are men looking after the cattle – about three men doing that. Plus the manager. The milk is delivered on contract to a big distributor. We deliver 50,000 litres every second or third day and are making a lot of money.
There are two other villages where a dairy project is being set up similar to this. There is some controversy regarding the quality of the soil. It is said to be too shallow to grow the pasture you need to make the dairy work.
We can consider how this project could be extended out to the community. It has to make money because it has to sustain itself to provide training opportunities for the university. If we look at the land around the university in a ten kilometre radius. We have made a guesstimate of 3,000 litres wasted a day. For example cows with calves which are not milked can get mastitis. If they were milked, it would be 10 litres a day – more than any one household can use. We are thinking of setting up a cheese factory. We can buy 1,000 litres per week from our dairy to make the project sustainable. A niche product. Tyume cheese. Could become the market for 10 litres of milk from a farmer in the surrounding community. They would bring it in cars, horses. Could even keep the milk for a day or two. We test the milk. We will give the department of veterinary science access to the community herds. We will have to test for diseases, milk fat solids etc.
Terry: Why are farmers not milking their cows when they might get mastitis?
Francois: There is the difficulty of herding the cows and milking them.
The idea is that farmers organize themselves into co-ops and these co-ops buy shares in this dairy venture.
The herd of 800 cows creates a demand for 800 tonnes of maize per year – as an energy supplement to the grazing on irrigated pasture. Currently this maize is purchased in another province – Free State. Yet Fort Hare is a maize producing area. We need to motivate extension officers to get farmers to produce maize for us. We have spoken to agricultural officers about this but nothing has happened yet. A local chief has suggested he has 50 ha of community land for this – he would use the money they got for the maize to upgrade community facilities. In fact there is not a lot of cropping around Fort Hare. The risk of crop failure is very high. They really need irrigation. Rainfall is 500 mm but erratic. Many of these communities had communal maize areas and have stopped cropping in the past five years. We produce maize at Fort Hare using animal traction.
Comments on the dairy project
This project seems like a dream come true. A group of very knowledgeable and wealthy dairy farmers offer the villagers equal shares in a profitable dairy business that can produce 50,000 litres of high quality milk every few days. They are doing this to fit the government’s BEE programme but also to make money, so the project seems viable economically in the long run if all goes according to plan. All the villagers have to do is supply the farming land (250 hectares) and the commercial farmers will supply the infrastructure and training.
The Fort Hare version
To examine this proposal let us begin from the ground up. Firstly the Fort Hare project as it is now constituted does not actually involve a large number of black villagers – probably about twelve. In that project design, the profits flow back to the university and to the commercial farming syndicate. Some wages go to the local community but hardly sufficient to make a dent in rural poverty. The proposed cheese making business can be seen as a remedy for this. Milk that would otherwise be wasted is collected by villagers who are paid by the cheese factory. This could certainly earn some extra cash income and the virtue of this plan is that it does not disturb the subsistence functions of the current cattle economy of the village. It merely provides and encourages a market for some of the surplus. It is like an archar business, selling to a local market and supplied with surplus mangoes from trees grown on home stands.
When I stayed in Alice in 2010 I was able to discuss this intervention with a number of local people. Some staff in the University of Fort Hare agriculture department were enthusiastic about the project but others were more critical. It is hard for me to assess the truth of this situation one way or another. The allocation of this university land to the project is one point of contention. It is alleged that this took place without proper university consultative procedures being in place. The project has cut into the grazing area held by the university and, according to some, compromised the rotational grazing strategy that they were adopting previously. The land has been supplied to the commercial farmers at a nominal rent. So far, all of the profits have gone to the commercial farmers because they paid for the supply of the cattle and the machinery – it is only after this initial investment has been paid back that Fort Hare will be compensated for the share they have put in through donating their land to the project. The commercial farmers are also getting free water for their irrigation from the Bimfield dam which is also supposed to supply the community farmers for this whole district. So the project has effectively removed a community agricultural resource from the poor in order to employ a small staff of black workers on a commercial project.
What is worth noting with this University of Fort Hare version of the dairy project is that the project works like a commercial farm with black employees. It is the university and the commercial farmers who supply the business know how and accounting skills to run such complex machinery. It is they who train the black manager and the local employees and continue to ensure the financial success of the project. The initial investment is also considerable and although in this instance there is no doubt that the investment will be repaid, it is less secure if we move the project design from the university to the village context. The design also depends on the purchase of fuel or electricity to run the irrigation and dairy machinery, as well as money to pay for repairs. It depends on a good and reliable supply of electricity and an extensive supply of irrigation water. As well as good soil. Almost none of these ingredients can be guaranteed if we move the project to a village setting.
Moving it to a village setting
In the interview, Francois speaks of two village projects. While I was at Alice in 2010, I heard much about the project version at Middledrift, which is one of these two village sites. Prior to this visit I made these comments following my interview with Francois in 2009.
We can envisage two possible problems in moving to a village setting.
One is that the local people involved in the project will not be able to continue to run it successfully, to market the milk, to maintain the irrigation and the dairy machinery and the like. It is difficult enough to get people to maintain a small plot of vegetables irrigated with a bore and a diesel pump and to market the produce from that. The pumps are frequently vandalised or stolen. The money to supply the repairs or necessary inputs are not effectively put back into the project after sales. It is easy to imagine a similar scenario in this case.
The opposite outcome is less likely but could also be problematic. Let us imagine that the commercial syndicate works well with the village and supervises the project to ensure good outcomes. Effective managers from outside the village are hired to ensure the accounting and farming science is done properly and these managers work well with local staff (the twelve villagers selected to be workers on the project). Water, electricity and markets are not a problem. Effective mechanics are available to repair anything that goes wrong and someone is hired who can arrange to source necessary parts.
In such a case the key problem is to distribute the largesse created by the project in a way that empowers and maintains local people. The danger is that all the profits flow to the commercial syndicate, the village elite and the twelve employees. What the rest of the community loses in the deal is grazing land which is no longer available for the use of poor households to graze their cattle. Even if 50% of the profits in fact go to the village council and are distributed, they may not be spent wisely by villagers but frittered away without much long term impact.
In such a case, the point of project design that needs to be worked on is how the money is being used by the village. It is not out of the question that it will be invested in long term useful community projects – better roads; support to household food gardens; better schooling. In such a case the project will be a hybrid between a successful market enterprise and a community fund.
In other words, none of the beneficial outcomes promised for the project can be assured unless the donor organizations pay and supervise adequate staff to ensure all stages of this project design work – from the dairy itself to the distribution and use of the income.
During my visit in 2010, I heard much criticism of the Middledrift project. The criticism was all based in the second scenario outlined above. The project has been very successful as a commercial farm, but whether it is bringing any great advantage to the residents of Middledrift is another matter.
One critic argued that the land for the dairy project has been taken from the community grazing land on the excuse that the people organizing it are “local” to the area. That is the only sense in which the profits are being given back to the community. The black politician who is master minding all this is a “son of the soil” from this region but really the 20 farmers who are local residents participating in this project are all his middle class cronies. They have tied up this leasing arrangement so tightly that the community cannot really get out of it for a hundred years. This is effectively an act of appropriation of community land for commercial farming, with a coalition of black middle class and white farmers organizing and profiting from the appropriation at the expense of the black farmers who used to own this community land. The white farmers have gone into a 50/50 partnership with a set of black farmers which is giving them BEE status. The white farmers are providing the irrigation and the dairy as their part of the bargain, though the farm is getting the water for irrigation free of charge. The land being used for the dairy is of course the community’s best river flat land.
Another critic argued that the R1.5 million that had been made by the dairy last year was not being distributed to the community at all but was going to the white farmers and their black middle class allies. The local communities were complaining that they were promised various unspecified benefits but these had not been forthcoming. The local poor farmers said they thought the irrigation was for them to grow vegetables, but this had not happened. They want either irrigation to grow vegetables or the land back or a share of the profits. They say the land was taken without their consent. These people are using a lot of water for irrigation and none of the benefits of that are going to the villagers; all of whom would like water for irrigation for their vegetable crops. It is probably important to note something about land tenure that is relevant in this situation. I have been told that the land taken for this project was the cropping land of some few people whose land was on the edge of the river. Theoretically this is community land and is owned in trust by the chief to make use on behalf of the community as a whole, but de facto, it is regarded as owned by those who have been given a permission to occupy during the apartheid period. What this means is that the community at large has a point when they claim that ‘their’ land has been appropriated for this project without them getting any benefit. However in another interpretation of the land tenure system, it is only those whose actual cropping land has been affected who have any rights to compensation. I am presuming that they have been compensated or are part of the clique of allies of the politician leading the project. It is the other members of the community who are complaining.
While I was at Fort Hare, I explained some of these criticisms to supporters of the project. Their view was that the authority relationships within the black community were not the business of the university – it could not intervene to alter these politics and it would not be right to do so. They also argued that the amount of land in question was only 50 hectares out of a total of community land of approximately 4 000 hectares. So the excision of this dairy land could not be having any deleterioius impact on community grazing or cropping. Supporters of the project also believed that the community-owned subsistence farming that was taking place in the villages around Alice was not efficient and had not alleviated poverty, so that the commercialization of this small part of the community land had to be a move in the right direction – towards efficient profitable agriculture capable of employing people and relieving poverty through a cash income. The supporters of the project were enthusiastic about the fact that a black graduate of the university, a 21 year old woman was the manager of the Middledrift dairy project. It was a first for one of their black graduates to get a job in a serious commercial business, so from their point of view the project is a good example of BEE. It is introducing black trained agriculturalists and staff into commercial farming, with the help of white commercial farmers. In this perspective, the resentment of local people is just sour grapes and this kind of attitude is holding back the advancement of black people into important positions in the economy.
Despite this, in the end the project has also to be evaluated in relation to the problems of the villages. To what extent is this investment of resources by the University (through their expertise) and the government (through irrigation) and the community (through their land) the best use of resources to relieve rural poverty? Middledrift was in fact one of the two areas reviewed by Nomokhaya Monde for her research into food insecurity in Eastern Cape. She found that more than 70% of villagers were poor or very poor. Even the ones who were not poor were food insecure. The ones who were ‘not poor’ had maize every meal in various different forms and were never ‘hungry’. However they used to have vegetables only one or two times a week. Also, in terms of meat they would have meat but it would be mostly mutton flaps which they buy from Australia! The poor ones are in an even worse situation and often go to bed hungry or skip certain meals. The government school feeding program only applies to some children. She interviewed residents of one household where the mother was 48 but looked 70. She stayed in bed all day and later died. She had two boys. Only one received the school meal and he would have to share it with the other one. These are just some examples of the situation that obtains in the region of the Middledrift dairy. At the very least, one would have to say that on present evidence the dairy is not doing a great deal to assist such people.
Agri-Park
Francois: This province has a number of issues with regards to poverty alleviation, food security and job creation. Our role as a university is to develop agricultural technologies and means to deal with these issues. Eight years ago we established the Agri-Park. We make use of grant funding, so that profitability is not an issue. Our aim is to develop co-ops to create a pool of local black residents who have financial literacy and can begin work in their own communities.
We do not have sustainable funding for this project. It is run through grants and donations, from companies. For example our drying apparatus was donated. The university provides the infrastructure. This is OK because we are developing a prototype. There is nothing like this in South Africa. There is now another one set up in the community of Duchois by the government. Ours is set up by the university. So we are now developing the third one.
The three legs
Each agri park has three legs. This describes the university one.
A nursery which is a co-op. They produce seedlings which they sell to the production unit. They also take work from outside – for example to produce seedlings for the forest industry.
The second one is the production unit – a farm. 30 hectares. Under irrigation. Water is from a channel from a dam upstream. They sell their products to the processing unit.
The third leg is a processing unit. This is to produce a product for sale.
The aim is to create a financially viable and economically sustainable production unit – to develop production models for small scale farmers. Our project design is intended for farmers who are now subsistence farmers who have no other income. The intention is to create the kind of project that could allow these people to make a living out of farming. We want to target the people who are now unemployed and farming only for subsistence – the kind of people whose only access to cash now is a bit of an income from pensions and remittances. These people would pool their land – their community land, home stands and so on.
We have secured a contract, after political intervention, for 10,000 meals per week for a few schools, in the last month. An NGO project funds the schools to buy the food. The aim is that we will supply food for the schools from both of these Agri-Parks (the one at the university and the one at Duchois).
At the university
At the university, about 50 people were retrenched about eight years ago. They had lived at the university. The faculty was in the process of trying to look at production models for small scale farmers. We thought, why not use these people to run the experiment – pay them a bit from grants and what they earned? There are now 54 involved at the uni – 12 in the nursery, 20 in the processing unit – more on the farm.
Cabbages, beetroot, spinach, butternut, onions, carrots are what we grow. There are 10 hectares that are cultivated with irrigation. We also produce trees for sale. The people at the university find it “tough going” to make a living out of selling the produce but could do better if we could find a market. They could produce more than they can sell. In Alice there are no commercial farmers selling in Alice itself. Instead, commercial farmers in Alice take their produce to East London to sell. Seven years ago we got three farmers to produce about one and a half hectares of cabbages and we flooded the market in Alice. There are about 20 to 30 thousand people around Alice with access to land. With our 10 hectares now we could easily flood the market in Alice. What we do now, is some of our producers sell to shop keepers in Alice. A large proportion is left unused – either because of poor quality – or because of no demand with better quality available. That is sold to the processing unit.
Each of these legs is a little co-op on its own. There is an overarching trust which they are affiliated to. The processing unit makes all the money. The three co-ops put their earnings into a fund.
The processing unit has a dryer and also cooking facilities. We make the products. For example dried onions, pea flour, butternut flour, soup, archar from butternut offcuts, spinach, cabbage. These are sold on campus as well. They are making the most money from this leg of the project. In this processing unit we could process one tonne of vegetables today but we cannot market anything like this – more like 200 kgs per day. With our new funding we will be able to process four tonnes of vegetables today. The water for this is coming from the university. There is a lot of energy used – this takes up 30% of our costs. We have secured a contract to create a methane plant with sewerage from Alice to run our processing plant but we now use electricity from the grid.
How do you motivate people to continue on when there is not much of a market? They do earn an income – but not is a living wage. It is R200 to R300 per month. They continue on because of their commitment to the project, though there has been a drop off in the membership. Every year 10% go and another 10% come in.
Duchois.
Our idea was to perfect the concept and then replicate that in the communities – it had to include the training programme. The provincial department of agriculture came to us last year and said we want an Agri-Park now in Duchois. They put the money on the table. They have very good land at Duchois – deep sandy loam.
In Duchois, the local chief gave a piece of the communal land – about 40 hectares – to the project. He said you must use that for the Agri-Park. It had been grazing land. It was lying fallow, not being used for anything. We need more information on this – the use of community land. The chief recruited people to be involved in the project. The project here is managed by the community; the leadership of the community says who is involved. I am not sure how many people are involved in Duchois but the whole community is involved. Duchois is south of Mthatha. There are about 20 000 people in Duchois. The idea is that it should be an economic intervention in Duchois.
The Duchois project has just been set up. They have planted and cultivated the land. The nursery has been started. I am not sure where the water is coming from. They do not have electrticity from the grid – they must have diesel generators to run it. We are not sure how they are going to get the electricity supplied in the long term. This is a government funded project that has been requested by the department and the university has not really assessed all aspects of the project model to see whether the project can work in the long term. It will be up to the department of agriculture to sort out any problems that come up.
Problems with vandalism at the uni site
At the uni site, there are four shipping containers used to hold the equipment that is being used, the generators and the chemicals. We think that somebody thought that the money that was being gained through selling produce to local shopkeepers was being held in these containers. They ransacked and burned all of those four containers. There was R600 000 worth of damage. This is reality.
Terry: So, if this is what happened at the university, let us imagine a similar problem with an Agri-Park site in a village. Would it recover from such an event?
Francois: That would not be likely. To make an Agri-Park profitable, your contracts must run. It is like a factory. You produce and supply, but if your production is erratic, there is no way you can survive without external funding. Even if you generated this money with your profits, there would be a break in production. The university would not be able to provide funding to back up the operation at Duchois in the case of such an event.
Relevance of an agri park to a village economy
At most an Agri-Park could sustain about 100 people directly. It is the spin-offs that will generate new opportunities in the villages. People buy from the Agri-Park to sell to the community; a sort of spin-off effect. But you need funding for that – to get it set up.
Comments on the Agri-Park project
In some ways this is not an a-typical project, a first design of this kind, as Francois suggests at the beginning of the interview (for a longer discussion see Leahy 2009 – especially chapters 3 and 4). A farm, operated as a co-op, on 10 hectares, with irrigation, intended to produce a commercial crop of vegetables is a classic of project design in the rural villages of South Africa. What is probably different about the university version of this is that the university is actually continually supplying supervision and the kind of financial and agricultural advice that these projects usually lack. What normally happens is that such projects are established by agricultural extension officers who after an initial training period depart, leaving the project in the hands of the villagers. Some typical problems with these projects are avoided if the university continues this supervision. But of course, the problem then becomes the difficulty of replicating this long term support in the village context.
What has been added to this standard project design (the farm) to create the Agri-Park are two further operations or legs of the project – the nursery and the processing unit. In terms of their social strategy, these two further legs are identical to the farm and to the majority of projects in South Africa. They create a small co-op and fund an initial grant of infrastructure that is quite expensive but is considered necessary to get villagers started on a commercial production – the drying and cooking facilities in the case of the processing plant. As with the irrigation and pumps supplied to rural projects similar to the Agri-Park “farm”, this equipment is complicated to repair and maintain. One can note that other projects in South Africa are also attempting to fund processing plants to add value to agricultural products from the villages – for example the Lwashatsimu project to use mangoes to produce archar, or the Mhala development center in Bushbuckridge, which is intended to add value to marula fruits and other local products.
When I was in Alice, I spoke to Jan Raatz, who was then the dean of agriculture and had founded this project. As noted in another paper, his view was that the small amount of land and resources available to villagers made it difficult for them to make money from commercial agriculture. To enable a real income, they had to move up the value chain to produce foods which would be marketed and generate a profit for the community as a whole. This is the whole point of the Agri-Park plan. It is the processing unit which provides the income which can make the whole arrangement viable. In the processing unit, as it is at present constituted, the vegetables produced by the production unit are cooked and dried and turned into nutritious soups.
Jan is aware that marketing these products is a key problem for his project. His intention at the time was to get a large government contract for the whole of the Eastern Cape to supply these soups to schools for their lunch programs. The intention was to expand the whole Agri-Park strategy to a great number of Eastern Cape villages so it would be possible to supply all schools at once. Clearly this would involve a huge investment of government money in all stages of the Agri-Park projects in the villages – the nurseries, irrigated farming production units and processing plants.
My latest information (2011) is that this contract has been withdrawn following political changes in the Eastern Cape government. There has also been a campaign of attacks on the probity of Jan Raatz organized by certain sections of the governing party and university staff. According to Jan, it was said that he had received half a billion from government or the Americans and has pocketed the money and is not paying his workers. It was certainly true that the workers were being paid very poorly and were to some extent volunteering their work with the hope that this project will eventually take off an provide real jobs. My own opinion is that these attacks on Jan are unfounded but then I am not really in a position to be certain of this. Jan Raatz has now retired as Dean.
Nevertheless, this project is certainly worth some extensive discussion as an interesting attempt to deal with poverty and unemployment in the South African villages.
Some of the problems of this project design are masked by the university context of the operation. If we look at the university and village sites for this project design quite separately, we can dramatize the social and economic differences like this.
The unversity Agri-Park is like an experimental agricultural station set up and funded by the university (with some outside donors). The university makes use of its expertise and available human capital (agricultural scientists, accountants and so on) to supervise this enterprise. Consequently it is an arm of the university and the people working in the Agri-Park are really university employees whose income is supplemented by some direct payment for sales of produce.
By contrast what is hoped for in the village Agri-Park context is that this whole operation will be funded by an initial grant of equipment and advice but that it will become self sustaining in a fairly short period. After that it will run as a fully commercial cooperative organization. All funds to replace and repair machinery will come from the banking of money from sales of produce. All funds for ongoing inputs (chemicals, diesel oil, electricity, water) will come from sales of produce. The supervision of the whole operation will be achieved by a management team elected by members of the cooperative and responsible to the cooperative as a whole to ensure financial efficiency and transparency. Any outside expertise required to maintain the machinery will be efficiently hired and supervised by this management team.
My comments in 2010
After I interviewed Jan in 2010, I had this to say about the Agri-Park project. My concern that this project would not actually get government support have been amply borne out by events.
The Agri-Park project strategy is not a strategy to set up a capitalist firm. The principle is collective ownership and egalitarian distribution of the income from the cooperatives. The aim is to pay the local farmers an above market price, using the profits from the processing centre to allow that. That is not just a moral framework but also necessary for it to work. In other words, as Jan explains, the returns on agriculture are very marginal unless you are a large producer and even then most of the profit comes from value adding after the farm gate. The problem for villagers is their minute ownership of agricultural capital. He wants to solve that by refunding some of the value adding back to the farmers so their farm gate price is higher. In other words, the agri-park coop making the soups is going to pay over the market price for their cabbages and maize when it comes from village farmers although they will pay the going rate for food sourced from commercial farmers. This strategy depends absolutely on being able to pay all concerned a living wage, which Jan defines as R20 000 per year. In other words, all those in the Agri-Park co-op and in the villages which contract to supply vegetables, end up with that income if they are working full time. Without that you just have a steady drain of human capital out of the project. Yet at the same time, because margins are so small, if your aim is to pay this to village members of the cooperatives, you must pay all staff close to this living wage. Some experts could be paid a premium but there is no extra funds to pay a profit to an elite group of “owners” or shareholders. People driving BMWs as he puts it.
Yet this organizational form is deeply different both to projects and to capitalist firms and also goes against the default form of alternative to capitalism here – patrimonial chiefly patronage. In that sense it is a truly radical alternative and its success can be very threatening to every vested interest, from unions to politicians to business.
What this project shares with community group entrepreneurial projects (the kind that always fail inn South Africa) is the principle of collective ownership and egalitarian distribution of income. Like projects, this form of organization is deeply antithetical to the cultural norms embodied in the two most common kinds of agricultural enterprise – the small kin based agricultural groups doing subsistence agriculture and the capitalist firm. Also similar to community group entrepreneurial projects is the intention to make an entrepreneurial success by selling goods.
What is different from the community group entrepreneurial project are the following key aspects:
- The size of the operation and the promise to pay all members a living wage.
- The attempt to control every part of the agricultural value chain.
- The intention to market the products through government rather than into the capitalist marketplace. In other words to get a guaranteed price and very long term contracts.
- The investment of the human capital of UFH at the top level of management and economic control of the whole organization.
In some ways it is the last of these which is the most difficult to maintain. My view is that it depends upon Jan’s position as Dean which gives him the power to organize this, to get funding, and to recruit staff from the department to help. These people are able to:
- Organize the business and technological side of all this.
- Apply for and secure funding, or make use of the resources of UFH.
- Maintain a strict system of accounting which allows the redistribution of profits.
- Ensure that an appropriate amount of money is set aside for maintenance and replacement of equipment, for organization and marketing.
This in turn depends on the particular values that Jan himself and some of his staff bring to this, as well as their high level professional skills and their place within the UFH organization. In my view, none of this is replaceable. Their control over this organization as a whole is absolutely vital to operating it at the present stage and any democratic decision making by cooperatives themselves must be regarded as advisory. Nevertheless, morale absolutely depends on staff having real control of a lot of decisions being made by the firm and by the cooperatives. With egalitarian distribution, there is little motivation attached to working hard and rising through the ranks. Motivation has to come from a sense of being a participant in a joint enterprise.
This has to be negotiated over time. A quick transition to local democratic control would instantly result in the patrimonial degeneration of the organization, as people attempted to make the whole thing look more like a capitalist firm, with profits being siphoned off at the top. The result would be to lose the support of lower level staff and villagers from the communities, as incomes for less skilled members went down, You would also lose skilled management at the top, as decisions came to be made that went against their professional advice and so on. On the other hand, a five year transition is not impossible if you could find local people who have become accustomed to how this organization works and are committed to its basic principles of collective ownership and egalitarian distribution. These people would have to be elected by staff in the cooperatives and have their support to carry out the essential skilled professional work of accounting and technological advice.
I have to say that all this seems like a very tall order. I cannot see local politicians being at all pleased with this arrangement, even more if it is wildly successful, and yet they are the ones who will decide whether they get government contracts. The other problem is that the other local people who will inevitably be left out will become wildly jealous and angry that some of their community resources are being used by a small few in each village who are growing vegetables for this organization and being handsomely paid to do so. If there is any equipment that can be vandalized in the villages supplying the food, that is a very likely outcome. No one will believe that Jan and the other lecturers are really operating this organization in a spirit of disinterested benevolence, because that goes against the cultural norms that they have become used to. Vandalism and theft against the processing unit itself is also highly likely. Basically, you have to pay for round the clock security at any venue being run in connection with this. This has to be built in.
The best thing for the organization to do is not to expand with similar centres in other districts. These will inevitably be patrimonial disasters that will just give the whole thing a bad name. The best thing is to expand from the central base at Fort Hare by taking in more and more villagers and enlisting them in a cooperative to get them a paid job in the organization as a whole. That way you would ensure that in this transitional period, control from the top by people genuinely committed to the principles of the organization is maintained, while at the same time, it would become clear that there is an intention to include other villagers over time. You have to see this experiment as Mondragon rather than a franchise.
What goes wrong with community group projects?
As the reader will be by now aware, these comments of mine in 2010 turned out to be prophetic. The government did not award the big contract and Jan retired, having been the target of various allegations of corruption.
Agri-Park is based on a kind of project design that I call a “community group entrepreneurial project”. My research suggests that for every working project in a village there are usually between three to eight projects that have been started at some point in the past and later fell apart. The working projects are almost always projects established within the last few years. So what goes wrong? People usually explain this by talking about the inevitable clashes of personality between key figures and their families. This is probably the way it is. But as well, they often say that projects fail because people are lazy here. Neither of these explanations is very helpful. Conflicts like this come about because of problems with what these projects can do.
Limited opportunities for income
One is that the extra production infrastructure that the project supplies – usually a bore and pump – can boost production a bit but not enough to give any serious amount of extra cash to the 40 people that a project typically recruits. The amount of land is about what four families would normally occupy on their community cropping fields (4 hectares). So even if all this land is used effectively it cannot provide much of an income boost to 40 households. More often than not, problems with the infrastructure and inputs means that even this amount of land is not used effectively to produce a good commercial result.
So, without serious financial incentive, motivation becomes a problem. There is work and financial commitment required to maintain this infrastructure, to maintain the social connections between members and to manage the business side of the project. If the project does not pay well, motivation for all this work is lacking.
The problem of inadequate financial incentive and little impact on poverty is typical of community group projects and comes from the following factors.
Firstly a group of 40, which is the typical size for a community group project, is a small fraction of the total village community and even if the incomes of these forty people were substantially improved this would do little to relieve poverty for the whole village. Secondly, the amount of land allocated for a typical project is insufficient to support a commercial project that would substantially increase the incomes of the forty project members. Finally, the government or NGO funding and the human capital supplied by the members is insufficient to produce a commercial outcome proportional to the land that has been supplied to the project.
Some of these problems apply to Agri-Park and some do not. In this case a group of 54 members is working an irrigated plot of 10 hectares and also running a processing plant and a plant nursery. So in theory there is more productivity and opportunity for income than on a typical 4 hectare project site. Nevertheless, in fact the income, at R200 per month, is way below that which can sustain interest in the project in the long term. Francois attributes this to problems of marketing. The problem is that this small scale operation is in competition with commercial farms that have a hundred hectares or more of irrigated land and even more machinery and inputs than those which have been supplied to Agri-Park. As well, marketing of the produce is a problem if the vegetables have to be trucked to East London to get a market. The rural villagers in Eastern Cape do not generally have sufficient income to buy a great many of these vegetables, which are somewhat of a luxury.
Clearly the long term aim of the Agri-Park project was to solve these marketing problems by getting a large government contract. While this makes sense in a particular case, the failure to do this here shows how unreliable this solution is. What is more interesting in a way is that if South Africa was to solve its unemployment and rural poverty problems through government contracts to villagers, the effect would be a massive turn around in the neo-liberal strategy that the ANC has pursued. Politically this seems unlikely at the present time. I am certainly of the opinion that this could work but it would be regarded by the international markets as a ‘socialist’ solution and would be punished by at least some withdrawal of international capital from South Africa.
In other areas of South Africa where cropping on community land and household stands is the norm, most vegetables are weedy companion plants to the standard cereal crops, rather than being planted separately in irrigated patches – they include the obvious squash, peanuts and cow peas as a companion to maize but also extend to amaranth, Bidens pilosa, jute mallow and other locally available weedy greens. From the point of view of nutrition, these available easy growing plants are a cost effective food security solution. In this case, the funding of equipment is substantial and in the university version of the project, the human capital and finance is available to maintain this equipment and replace it if necessary. However, it seems unlikely that such initial start up funding and ongoing support will actually be available to a great number of villages in the Eastern Cape. As with projects of this kind generally, the number of people who can be profitably employed in such a project is estimated at a small fraction of the number of poor rural residents in the community for which the project is established. In this case the total employees are estimated at 100 and the residents of Duchois at 20 000. You would have to be a strong believer in the trickle down effect to imagine that the huge cost of establishing such a project is justified by the small impact it is likely to have on the poverty of the great majority of villagers.
Awkward social connections
Another problem is that a typical group for farming in these communities is not a large group of unrelated people. Mostly, when people work together in agriculture in the villages, it is with members of their family. A typical cropping group consists of two sisters or female friends and some of their children. This kind of working group is typical of developing country situations and as Roland Bunch suggests, it is better to start “building institutions” with a group like this rather than attempting a larger community cooperative (Bunch 1997: 220). In the case of Agri-Park, problems like this do not arise in a situation where the university directly controls and employs staff to run the project. However, these problems are quite likely to be significant in the context of a village version of Agri-Park.
Distrust of leadership and corruption
Working together as members of a community farming cooperative is an unfamiliar social experience. Although the project model is founded on an expectation of democratic participatory management – a cooperative – it is hard to know how to make decisions as equals in such a big group. It is hard to know whether to trust those who have become leaders of the group. Corruption can happen where the leaders appropriate government funds for their own use. It is just as much of a problem if the members of the group suspect their leaders of being corrupt. This is more likely if the financial structures necessary to run the group are complicated, meaning that the wealthy and educated members of the community are most likely to take control (Bunch 1997). As Roland Bunch says, the ideal organization to be setting up is one that does not need to handle money (Bunch 1997).
In thinking about these issues, I have been helped to an understanding of what happens through an interview with Augustus, who for many decades had worked as a project officer for NGO agricultural projects in the villages. Like most of my interviewees he was very much aware of how many of these projects failed in the long term and had a perceptive analysis of the kinds of things that would usually go wrong. His first explanation was that members of a group expect that a project will make money quickly and that they will receive something for their efforts. When this does not happen they become disillusioned and leave the project. Secondly, they join a project because they hear that a certain amount of money is available for the project – for example R80 000. When there is no cash paid out to beneficiaries, they become convinced that the leaders must be siphoning off the money for their own purposes, which certainly does happen on occasions. However, what is just as likely is that the project donors (government or NGO) are requiring that all expenses be justified and be paid out for work done or materials purchased. For example, the leaders may have a cheque book and be able to write out cheques; but only if they can get receipts for the materials bought with these cheques. There is no money available to pay beneficiaries directly. When beneficiaries get no cash income, they will be teased by other villagers as gullible – why are they putting in all this work for no benefit? Other villagers can be jealous of the project beneficiaries and take delight in their discomfort when the expected payoff does not eventuate.
As above, these problems are unlikely in the context of the university project. There is effectively no requirement that funds from agricultural produce are returned to the project in order to purchase inputs and to repair or replace equipment. Instead, it seems that sales are treated as a part of the income of the members of the project. In this case, members must regard the university as an arm of government, supplying the infrastructure free of charge. There is a common project to develop this enterprise to the point of commercial success and the remaining members of the project are hoping that in the long run this will take place. In the mean time this is a useful supplement to pensions and remittances. However if this project was to be transferred to a village, all the issues raised by Augustus are likely to be very pertinent. In the case of Duchois it seems that the chief has volunteered the use of 40 hectares of land owned by the community for grazing. This could cause resentment. He has also recruited villagers to participate. This could well be seen as an unfair advantage given to 50 people in a village of up to 20,000. These 50 people are getting access to all the equipment being supplied by the government to fund the Agri-Park enterprise. In the event that the project does not pay good wages to the members, they are very likely to blame the chief and his allies and suspect that corruption has taken place. In the event that the project is a success, these people are likely to be regarded as friends and allies of the chief who have been unfairly favoured.
Community jealousy and theft
Community distrust partly comes from the setting up of projects on land that is owned by the community as a whole and was in the past de facto allocated to individual families as their cropping land, or to the community as grazing land. Secondly, distrust comes from the singling out of certain beneficiaries from the community as a whole. Those who are not part of the project can wonder why these 40 project members are getting access to government resources that are not available to the rest of the community. There is usually some community distrust of the beneficiaries coming from this.
The community suspicion that a group like this faces can make theft a problem. For example, thieves may steal the pump supplied to irrigate the vegetables being grown for the project. Theft often stops community group projects, which will not be supplied with a replacement pump by the government departments, which funded the project in the first place. Thieves from the community steal the broiler chickens or the vegetables or the pump or the fencing wire. Vandalism is also possible. People seem very willing to take fencing wire or move their cattle onto land that is designated for a project – especially if this was land that was previously owned by the whole community or assigned to a few families by Permission to Occupy Certificates given out by the apartheid government and tribal authorities.
It is projects that provoke theft. The project’s ownership of land, resources and equipment is not seen as legitimate. The land has been taken from grazing land previously owned by the community as a whole, or from cropping land owned by particular families. The materials and infrastructure for the project are being distributed to a small group in the community who are seen as advantaged by government largesse. Tall mesh fencing topped with razor wire is almost always necessary to protect projects – from the community – while people’s individual cropping fields for the most part have no fencing at all. This constant harassment drains the members of energy and financial resources.
All this is quite likely for the Agri-Park projects. The land for the Duchois project was donated by the chief but was previously used by the community as a whole. The fifty project members were recruited by the chief. The whole project was funded by a government grant. Theft and arson have already taken place at the university processing plant. As Francois acknowledges, a version of this project in the villages would not be able to re-supply this equipment unless government funded the replacement. This is unlikely. As he also points out, this kind of problem can interfere with the predictability that is necessary to implement serious commercial contracts. This is another way in which village community projects are at a disadvantage in competing with private large scale farming enterprise.
Inadequate financial skills
Inexperience in business is another kind of problem for projects like this, which are oriented at a commercial operation. For example, a project is often designed to produce a cash income and set aside some of that money to pay for inputs, to pay for repairs to machinery or to pay to replace machinery in the event of theft. The accounting skills required to make this design work are often beyond the knowledge of beneficiaries.
For example, a project can expect beneficiaries to set aside money from the sale of their produce to fund the project itself. Yet this requires individual members to keep an accurate account of sales, to put the money aside and not to spend it, to return their sales money to the treasurer and receive back a portion as income. It requires the treasurer to save the money and not spend it, to keep an accurate account, and for this procedure to be transparent and understood by members.
The larger the number of beneficiaries who are involved, the more these accounting issues get mixed up with issues of trust and honesty. The less educated are the beneficiaries, the more difficult it is to get these accounting issues dealt with effectively – to find a competent treasurer and secretary and to ensure that members understand what is going on. As Roland Bunch puts it, “If only two or three people can understand the accounting, effective participation is limited to those two people. And only their goodwill will keep the organization from being run not only by them but for them” (Bunch 1997: 217).
The main problem is that these organizational and financial problems take place in a context where the project does not actually increase people’s earning power by very much. So it is easy to give up the project rather than hang on through the inevitable disputes and setbacks.
In practice, it is questionable whether community groups set up in rural villages in South Africa are equipped with the business know-how that is necessary to operate group funding effectively. As Roland Bunch remarks for development initiatives in general, such projects are based in the model of the “cooperative” but actually cooperatives “are tremendously complicated structures that are difficult to understand and even more difficult to run” (Bunch 1997: 217).
These issues are probably the most central problem for the Agri-Park project. Whereas in the context of the university, the financial and organizational issues can be supervised and constantly monitored by university staff, this is not the case in the villages. The Agri-Park model depends on a great deal of scientific and commercial knowledge to be effective. For example, villages would have to know how to repair and source parts for the irrigation equipment, the drying machinery, the catering equipment and so on. None of these forms of knowledge are a normal part of village life. They would have to know how to access and develop markets, create contracts that were in their interest and would not lead to them being caught out and running at a loss. As well as that, with the extreme poverty of villagers, there would be a constant temptation to subvert the process by which sales are re-invested in the business to purchase another round of inputs.
Suggestions for the Agri-Park model
The Agri-Park model can be successful at the university as an experimental university business. This is definitely how it should be developed at present. The aim should be to find markets for niche products that can be sold after having been produced on the farm and processed in the plant. The model is only ready for wider distribution when problems of marketing and financial viability in the long term have been solved.
The model should be seen as a prototype for emerging farmers on LRAD property rather than as a model for village poverty relief. In other words, at the university the “cooperative” nature of the project should not prevent the appointment of management and agricultural experts who can model the role of an emerging farmer employing local people as farm workers. These trainee managers should be people who have been educated at universities in business and agriculture. They should gradually take over the running of the project and the university should develop a system whereby these managers apprentice other managers to become sponsored emerging farmers. The university should seek private donors or government to fund and support these experts to take on LRAD farms and use the Agri-Park model on their own farms.
On the other hand, for the relief of village poverty a completely different strategy should be applied. This has been discussed above in reference to cattle problems. In relation to cropping, the university should be looking at cheap inputs to improve the productivity of home stand and community cropping land. At present in Eastern Cape, much community cropping has fallen into disuse. However there are certainly villages with large community owned plots – divided into sections owned by different villagers. These villages and their plots should be targeted to get serious improvements in productivity through more effective fencing, contour bunds, rotation and diversity of crops and complementary vegetables, green manure and cover crops, bands of agroforestry on contour and the like. The aim should be to prevent these villages from losing their cropping and to tempt other villages into re-starting their own cropping. For home stands, support should be given to strategies to increase the use of fruit, nut and fuel wood trees, to improve the productivity of free range indigenous poultry with hen houses and the planting of poultry fodder, to use water retention in tanks to water gardens and set up small homestand nurseries to start trees and vegetable crops, to develop composting and composting toilets to provide nutrients (see more on this in Leahy 2009 – especially chapter 2 and appendices).
References
Bunch, R. (1997) Two Ears of Corn: A Guide to People-Centered Agricultural Improvement,World Neighbours, Oklahoma
Holt, Richard (2005) Towards Sustainable Landcare Practices in South Africa: Version Two,LandCare South Africa, Pretoria
Leahy, Terry (2009) Permaculture Strategy for the South African Villages, PI Productions, Palmwood QLD
National Department of Agriculture (2004) Thuo- Boswa LandCare Cattle Project: a good-practice LandCare model, North West Department of Agriculture, Conservation and the Environment
Njeremoto Biodiversity Institute (2009) – www.njeremoto.org