Despite the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the formation of the new government after last month’s historic national and provincial elections, African National Congress veteran and farmer Matthews Phosa said farmers should not expect any drastic policy changes by the incoming administration.
Phosa was speaking during the last day of the Agbiz Congress at Sun City in North West as the Agricultural Development Agency (Agda) board chairperson.
‘Agriculture needs to be protected’
“I can assure you that there will not be a change in Section 25 of the Constitution; there will be no land expropriation without compensation. The president asked me to lead a team of lawyers to guide him on this matter and we resolved that to protect the agricultural sector, that section of the Constitution must not be amended,” he explained.
Phosa said the advice to the parliamentarians is that the agricultural industry needs to be protected because if it sneezes, the whole country would catch the flu.
“It was politicians who said we must not change that section in the Constitution and since then the noise of expropriation of land has been killed,” he said.
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Phosa noted that while there are uncertainties, financial institutions should come to the party and support black farmers in growing the sector and ensuring a food-secure country.
“I approach the matter of agriculture from a different point of view. I am not a banker, I am a farmer. Banks in their nature are pessimistic. If we worry too much about the risks, we will not have investors coming through.
“As Agda, we are looking at how can we bring the previously disadvantaged to the main stream of farming. Government is busy returning the land to black communities but the large portion of that land is lying fallow, [it] is not being used. In Limpopo, 70% of that land is lying fallow [and] it is not being farmed,” he said.
Meanwhile, Elias Masilela, an economist at Sanlam, said risks and challenges in the sector are hampering growth and thus threatening food production in the country.
“We need to be practical about the challenges we face much as the business sector is resilient and deals with challenges. But if you give businesses two choices of environment of risk or an environment of no risk, they will take no risk.
“It gets even worse if the risk is self-inflicted. It’s fine when it comes from other parts of the world [but] the problem is when the problem is generated within. It raises the cost of doing business and no business can flourish under such circumstances,” he said.
Stability is key
The outgoing chairperson of Agbiz, Francois Strydom, said he is hoping that the new government would know what their role is and re-look some policies that are not in line with the realities the country is facing now.
“Government is there to create an enabling environment but when they overstep with ideologies into the private sector, it becomes problematic from the investment point of view,” he said.
Strydom said black economic empowerment (BEE) is outdated and a 30-year-old policy. “There need to be new realities and the elections were a clear example of that. There are new realities, let us work with those realities,” he said.
Land Bank board chairperson, Thabi Nkosi, said as a state-owned bank, a lot has been done through blended finance to accommodate black farmers.
Agbiz economist Wandile Sihlobo said while the country is still waiting to know about the formation of a new government, the sector is a long-term investment and stability is vital.
“We believe that the next administration must focus on the relentless implementation of the Agriculture and Agro-processing Master Plan and the continuous release of government land to appropriately selected beneficiaries with title deeds,” he said.
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