Provincial and local government responsibilities {writer: Leon Alberts}

The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) has introduced and manages a Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme (CASP), aimed at providing effective agricultural support and to streamline the provision of services to the targeted different levels of clients within the farming continuum.

However, a study document under the title, “Food Security”, published by DAFF’s Economic Services Directorate earlier this year, states: “Pushing the national agenda to address food security at local community level is the responsibility of the provincial and local governments. It is at this level where the execution of national objectives takes place through, among others, appropriate problem identification, targeting and technical advice and support.”

The document, which reviews literature on food security studies in South Africa and identifies gaps, strongly makes the case that the link between agriculture and food security at household level is not always fully appreciated.

It further recommends future research on how agricultural sector can contribute significantly to food security in the country.

Making the case for more studies on the subject, the document states that much has been done in South Africa with regard to food (in)security. “However, the majority of studies focus on poverty and food insecurity in general, and not much has been done to link the two with agriculture.”

It is said that agriculture plays a vital role in poverty alleviation by reducing prices, creating employment and improving farm income and wages for farm workers, the document states, but these areas need to be further investigated. It should be “determined whether agricultural jobs that are created… have a positive impact on food security, since most jobs in agriculture are seasonal and not sustainable employment like in other sectors.”

The document comes to the conclusion that the role of agriculture toward food security has not been fully addressed in the literature, and further studies are required to determine the role that agriculture can play in food (in)security reduction by investigating the impacts of protects that have been initiated over the past years.

“Since the Department of Agriculture has invested heavily in a number of agricultural projects at community and household level, it is of utmost importance to carry out follow-up studies to determine the economic impact from agriculture’s point of view.”

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), in a 2008 report, deemed South Africa a largely food-secure nation, producing enough staple foods or having the capacity to import food, if needed, to meet the basic nutritional requirements of its population.

“Hart et al. (2009) supported the argument that South Africa seems to be food-secure at national level, but the same cannot be said about households and rural areas,” the document stated.

A 2009 survey by Statistics South Africa reported that an estimated 20% of South African households have inadequate or severely inadequate food access.

According to the FAO report of 2008, a high unemployment rate, inadequate social welfare systems and a high HIV/Aids infection rate have all contributed to household food insecurity in the country.

The DAFF report states,“Literature by Demetre et al. (2004) confirms South Africa’s national food-secure status, but suggests that more than 14 million people, or about 35% of the population in the country, were estimated to be vulnerable to food security.

“It is also reckoned that as many as 1.5 million, or about one quarter, of children under the age of six… have been stunted by malnutrition. This is supported by Machete et al. (2004) in (their) study, which confirms that food insecurity is more persuasive in rural areas. According to the report, the majority of poor people are found in rural areas, with roughly 75% of those chronically poor.”

About the role of agriculture, the report states that “making agriculture work must be (a) central component of policy approaches to food insecurity reduction and increasing economic growth. Increased investment in agriculture will help redress the current inequalities; empowering people to grow their own food for subsistence or income-generation will provide nourishment and potential income to many people in the country.”

In this regard, the report highlights, among others, the following points:

• In the absence of appropriate farmer support programmes, smallholder farmers will have little chance of escaping poverty, and agriculture’s role of creating livelihood will remain limited.

• The FAO report revealed that the majority of people living in rural areas had access to land, but lacked the necessary skills and access to recourses to farm sustainability.

• Lack of access to finance, communication infrastructure, education, skills development facilities and agricultural inputs still prevent black South Africans from making substantial progress in farming.

• An estimated four million people in South Africa are engaged in smallholder agriculture, mostly because agriculture is seen as the provider of the main source of food, or purely for subsistence. A specific problem, though, is that there are no credible long-term national data that establish the contribution of the subsistence or smallholder agricultural sector to food security; and

• Case studies done in 2009 pointed out a decline in agricultural activities in the former homelands, with the common reason being the removal of support that farmers in former homelands used to receive from pre-1994 governments.