agriculture

The Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) says that despite receiving half a billion rand more from treasury than last year with funds of just over R4 billion, land reform is still spluttering along in South Africa.

PLAAS land analyst, Ruth Hall, points out that the 2010/11 national budget shows that there was no indication of a new direction for land reform.

The European Union (EU) announced a US$13 million fund to help thousands of Zimbabwean smallholder farmers, in a bid to revive the Southern African country's agriculture sector after years of decline.

The EU's food security coordinator in Zimbabwe, Pierre-Luc Vanhaeverbeke, says that 80 000 households would benefit from the US$13 million donation through training and farming inputs such as seed and fertiliser.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009 is the tenth progress report on world hunger since the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS). Compiled by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the report highlights that the food crisis has twinned with the economic crisis increasing the number of hungry people. The global economic crisis had added another blow to the food-insecure and vulnerable.

The government is ‘obsessed’ with achieving the redistribution of 30 percent of agricultural land from white to black hands because failure to address skewed land ownership patterns will result in polarisation and calamity. This is according Rural Development and Land Reform Minister, Gugile Nkwinti.

Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook combines descriptive accounts of national and international experience in investing in agriculture with practical operational guidance on to how to design agriculture-for-development strategies that capitalise effectively on the unique properties of agricultural growth and rural development involving women and men as a high-impact source of poverty reduction.

The Land Bank has instituted legal action against 557 land owners, half of them emerging farmers, for failing to repay their loans.

Of the 557 the bank had instituted legal action against by 30 June 2009, 51 percent are emerging farmers and 49 percent are commercial farmers. Seven of the 13 farmers who already lost their farms this year were newly-established.

Moves to repossess farms come after the Land Bank lifted a moratorium on non-paying loans in July 2008.

AgriSA says genetically modified (GM) maize crops grew by 10 000 hectares and South Africa remains the eighth biggest producer of GM foods in the world.

AgriSA CEO, Kobus Laubscher says that, "South Africa maintain the number eight position in the world ranking of biotech crop countries, planting more than 1,8 million hectares of biotech crops."

Laubscher states that the biggest challenge is that farmers have to produce more crops for a growing population on smaller land. He says that there seems to be resistance to GM foods in the country.