South Africa: Local Farmers Asked to Help Zimbabwe
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Business Day (Johannesburg)
10 October 2008
Posted to the web 10 October 2008
Neels Blom
Johannesburg
AGRICULTURE and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana has asked SA's commercial farmers to join the agriculture department in coming to the aid of Zimbabwean farmers to prevent a food crisis in that country in the year ahead.
The minister told the farmers' union AgriSA at its annual congress in Pretoria yesterday that she had received an urgent request to assist in Zimbabwe. She also asked SA's financial services institutions to join in the rescue effort of Zimbabwe's farm sector.
An agricultural intervention may, however, be too late to prevent a food crisis in Zimbabwe, according to an estimate by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) last month that about half of Zimbabwe's people would need food aid next year.
Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers' Union president Trevor Gifford told the congress earlier that the country would be unable to plant the required 1-million hectares of maize needed to feed itself. There was fertiliser for only 40000ha and seed for a maximum of 360000ha, while the minimum annual planting is 1-million hectares.
Gifford said Zimbabwe would have to rely on food aid from the international community and its southern African neighbours at least until 2010. The recent power-sharing agreement was meaningless to farmers, and harassment and evictions were continuing. "There is no rule of law," he said, warning that hunger and social disintegration were likely to lead to regional instability.
In making her appeal for help for Zimbabwe from SA's commercial farmers, Xingwana appears to have performed a virtual turnabout in her attitude to commercial farmers. She recommitted her department to supporting an increase in food production in SA and to facilitate investment . She said the government was making an effort to mitigate increases in fuel and fertiliser prices. Good progress was being made, particularly in coming to an arrangement with industry about fertiliser prices.
Xingwana also admitted that "some of the land and farms handed over" for the purposes of land and agrarian reform in SA were "not working" and asked SA's commercial farmers to come to the assistance of emerging farmers who, she said, had an important role to play in SA's agriculture and in providing food security.
Earlier, the president of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, Ajay Vashee, reminded delegates that the global food crisis added 75-million people to the number suffering from hunger since last year.
That brought the number of people with insufficient nutrition for life and work to about 900-million, most of whom were African. The FAO estimated at its Rome meeting earlier this year that food production had to double by 2050 to meet world food needs.
Relevant Links
"This will have to be done on essentially the same land area, using less water. At the same time, farmers are being asked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change and also to conserve biodiversity," Vashee said, noting that governments, African ones included, lacked the political will to meet those needs.
Read comments. Write your own.
|
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Make allAfrica.com your home page
|
RSS Feed
Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >> | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
