True community resilience starts with economic opportunity rooted right at home. Mbusi Dlamini from Rainbow Chicken highlights how agriculture, especially the poultry industry, drives growth far beyond the farm gate.
The long-term resilience of any community depends on more than access to developed infrastructure or reliable public services. It depends on its ability to generate consistent economic opportunity for the people who live there.
It is worth challenging the assumption that a “developed” community is defined by the services that residents within the community receive. True sustainability and self-sufficiency are built on what a community can create and use to add social and economic value. And agriculture remains an industry capable of creating value at virtually every stage of its operation.
That value begins with empowering farmers, but it certainly does not end there. In the poultry industry alone, every chicken produced depends on an extensive network of knowledgeable and innovative farmers, grain producers, truck drivers, processors, retailers and countless small businesses. Together, they create economic opportunities that remain rooted in rural communities rather than flowing elsewhere.
Beyond infrastructure: Redefining true community self-sufficiency
Too often, we think about agriculture only in terms of the food that ends up on supermarket shelves, forgetting how diverse the industry actually is. Testament to this is the fact that 80% of the world’s food is produced by family farms in rural areas. These producers are the very backbone of our global food systems as well as an economic engine that sustains a multitude of rural communities.
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And, for many rural households in South Africa, agriculture begins as a means of putting food on the table. A small plot of land or a few livestock can reduce dependence on purchased food, improve household resilience and give families greater control over their own food security.
Yet the South African agricultural industry’s contribution to community resilience doesn’t end with small-scale farming. Further opportunity lies in ensuring that those who have the ambition and capacity to grow their operations can do so.
How interconnected value chains power local SMMEs
With access to markets, finance, training and infrastructure, small-scale and subsistence farming can evolve into viable enterprises that generate household income and create job opportunities for neighbours. This is already happening at scale, with farming SMMEs accounting for 50.6% of South Africa’s agricultural workforce, according to Statistics South Africa’s latest Census of Commercial Agriculture.
As agricultural enterprises grow, so too does their contribution to the wider economy. The poultry sector illustrates this well. Beyond contributing more than R74 billion to South Africa’s Agricultural Gross Production Value, it supports an extensive value chain that creates employment in areas where alternative opportunities are limited.
Keeping poultry affordable depends on that value chain functioning well, from grain farming and feed manufacturing to breeding operations, logistics, processing facilities and retail distribution. This matters because poultry is both South Africa’s most widely consumed and most affordable animal protein.
The interconnectedness of this ecosystem also creates resilience. Communities become resilient because the poultry value chain doesn’t create a single economic opportunity. It creates hundreds.
Transforming household security into rural economic growth
Every additional job, supplier or business supported by the sector strengthens the local economy and reduces dependence on a single source of income or external support. In turn, surrounding communities become more self-sufficient because income, employment and enterprise are created across an entire ecosystem rather than concentrated in one place.
This is why sustainable rural development is not simply about attracting new industries into rural areas. It is equally about unlocking greater value from the industries that are already deeply embedded in those communities. When existing agricultural value chains grow, so too do the opportunities they create for local businesses, workers and suppliers.
Agriculture should therefore be viewed as far more than a sector that produces food and supports food security. It is one of South Africa’s most effective engines for creating opportunity across households, small businesses and commercial value chains. If we are serious about sustainable rural development, strengthening agriculture is not simply part of the solution. It is where the solution begins.
- Mbusi Dlamini is the agriculture director of breed at Rainbow Chicken. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Food For Mzansi.
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