Domestic agricultural output has more than doubled since 1994. Last year, South Africa was the 32nd largest agricultural exporter in the world. The sector has played a major role in establishing national (though not household) food security. Although we remain a country of “two agricultures”, not least because of the inertia of government, overall, the sector has benefitted substantially under democracy. We need to focus on what we can fix to promote inclusivity and not become mired in the “doom-saying” by some international (and local) players.
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Pippa Green
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Editor's Corner
The latest editions of Econ3x3 feature two timely articles: one on the unemployment crisis – or as the writers put it the “crisis of missing jobs” - the other on the state of SA agriculture at a time when it is under threat by both domestic and foreign naysayers.
The first, by a group of writers associated with the public employment programmes, the Presidential Employment Stimulus and the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative, argue that many have approached the unemployment crisis - particularly youth unemployment – through a faulty lens. Fewer than three million jobs have been created since 2015 – a period when more than four million new jobseekers entered the labour market.
It is time to reframe the question: “An unemployment crisis tends to make us ask: what is wrong with the people who cannot find work? A crisis of missing jobs makes us ask: what is wrong with our society that it cannot create ways for people to contribute even though there is so much work to be done to make South Africa a better place to live in?”
Public employment programmes have been criticized as being an inadequate solution to the unemployment crisis. However, the writers argue, the “employment stimulus has shown… that the state and civil society have the capacity to create higher quality, better paid work that meets growing social and environmental needs..[and] provide work experience,… for a labour market that is unable to do so.”
Also timely, given the misinformation about the “targeting” of white farmers, is the measured article by Wandile Sihlobo about the state of South African agriculture.
Democracy has been good for the sector, he argues: it has more than doubled output since 1994 and last year the country was the 32nd-largest agricultural exporter world-wide. True, it faces serious challenges, including crime and inept municipalities; it is also true that land-reform projects have stumbled, largely due to the “inertia” of the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development.
But the big picture tells us that South African agriculture has “benefited from its connectivity with the world since 1994.” It is as much a message to domestic doomsayers as it is to foreign critics: “The stories we tell about ourselves and the country matter. They shape views domestically, and how others outside view us.”
Pippa Green