Innovating to Release the Potential of Agriculture in South Africa

NEWS & VIEWS: Many African farmers are small farmers, and many are women. Will small-scale agriculture remain a viable way of meeting food needs in the future?

I tend to have a bit of an aversion to the term small. It doesn't describe your production or your economic unit. African farmers are often described as small because many of them operate on a combination of small holding units, but I think the biggest problem for African agriculture is that many of the farmers are resource limited. They are resource constrained not so much from a natural resource point of view, because our resources are very rich, but from the fact that they need inputs and technology and information, which are critical for unlocking the potential of the natural resource.

Women for various reasons have remained the core producers of food for the household. In South Africa, for example, because of the migrant labor system, women have been left in the rural areas with very few employment opportunities other than some basic agriculture. Women are moving into other jobs, but that's still a slow process. What is changing is that women are actually making money in those rural areas in many creative ways. You have some groups of women who grow peppadew-a new product, something between a green pepper, paprika, and a chili, that they bottle and export to Europe. In other areas we are introducing goat production, where value-added takes the form of leather processing. Lots of women are doing food gardens, but we've got others who are entrepreneurs in new fields, like cotton-growing and asparagus. In my department we run a Female Farmer of the Year competition, which is helping female farmers become more visible and is a really interesting way of learning what they do. So there are quite a lot of innovations happening.

NEWS & VIEWS: Are you trying new ways of getting information to these women to help them get the most from their farming?

We're going to try something quite brave-we're going to try to digitalize. In South Africa we have something called multipurpose centers, or community meeting halls, which are instrumental at building social cohesion at the community level. In and around the community hall, you have small marketplaces that traders can rent to sell their wares, and you can have entrepreneurs opening shops and businesses. We have experimented with what we call farmer support centers, which become focal points for farmers in rural areas. We're working on expanding that into rural information centers which would bring Internet connectivity right into those areas, so that people could access websites and all sorts of other information right from where they are, with somebody to help them interpret what that information can help them do. We find that the greatest need is for people in rural areas to understand what services government has on offer and how and under what conditions they can access these. For agriculture we have available planning information based on the resource maps of an

We're trying to build a national ethic of land care and soil and water conservation. We have a whole package of legislation which actually forces that ethic.

area, climatic information for an area, technical information on the range of crops and products that can be grown or even developed in an area, and disease and quality-related information. We can also facilitate a link to market-related information-particularly prices of commodities on the market-which is often already available from the private sector for free. We realize that radio remains a dominant form of effective communication in rural communities, so we also use that quite extensively.

NEWS & VIEWS: In Africa, as in many parts of the world, the land most suited to agriculture is already under cultivation, and farmers are encroaching on less favorable lands. How much should countries like South Africa invest in policies and research to improved yields in these less-favored lands, as opposed to higher-potential areas?

Land quality issues differ in different countries, and the extent to which appropriate land is available for agricultural production differs in each country. Speaking for South Africa, what we've done is introduce the "land care" concept. This supports good nurturing of the land and replenishment of its capacity, so you build that into the production system. It doesn't help to avoid fragile lands and go for the high-potential lands, and then down the line they become fragile and you walk away from them. So we're trying to build a national ethic of land care and soil and water conservation. We have a whole package of legislation which actually forces that ethic, and we're doing a lot of work at the grass-roots level to facilitate catchment-related associations on natural resource use. We're also doing this as part of our antipoverty intervention, because a lot of poor people tend to find themselves in degraded areas. There is a cyclical effect of poor people on degraded areas and degraded areas on poor people-whichever way you look at it, it's bad, so we try to make that part of our antipoverty intervention.

NEWS & VIEWS: Agricultural biotechnology, and specifically genetically modified organisms, is very controversial in the industrial countries. How do you see this technology fitting into agriculture in Africa and South Africa?

In South Africa we tend to get a lot of the arguments that are presented in the North, presented here in an environment where people have not yet grappled with the totality of biotechnology. As a government we have legislation on genetically modified organisms, and what we're working on now is a balanced communications strategy and dialog on the totality of biotechnology-dealing with genetically modified foods as just one of the products of biotechnology. It's a much more constructive way of dealing with the debate. The benefits of biotechnology in improving precision in agricultural research are known to scientists, but the problem is, scientists are not very articulate in presenting those benefits. The danger of a media-driven dialog on genetically modified foods is that it does not deal with the science behind the foods. You could say sweet potato, which has resistance to the mosaic virus because of work done in Kenya, is a genetically modified food, but all you've done with that modification is to

Should we depend on increased use of fertilizer and herbicides-the total package of traditional inputs-to increase yields, or should we be innovative and make the quantum leap into biotechnology?

introduce resistance into the plant rather than spraying it with some kind of chemical. Something that has been sprayed has been equally modified. We try to shy away from having a naïve discussion on genetically modified food, as if there's some kind of monster which is suddenly appearing out of the gloom. We recognize the benefits of good science in agriculture, in lowering inputs, but we also are not blind to the fact that there are probably risks associated with the introduction of genetically modified foods. To contain the risks, what we have in place is legislation to promote the responsible development and use of genetically modified organisms.

NEWS & VIEWS: So GM crops could have a lot to offer African farmers.

I prefer to say biotechnology as a new package of technologies has a lot to offer Africa. And the range of ways in which we can apply biotechnology to African agriculture, from tissue cultures to gene markers, has so much value-added that by the time you get to GM foods, which I think are the craze of the northern countries, you've actually dealt with a lot of more basic issues. So when we talk about African agriculture, one needs to deal with biotechnology in its totality and not purely in the GM food dimension. The question we have to answer is, should we depend on increased use of fertilizer and herbicides-the total package of traditional inputs-to increase yields, or should we be innovative and make the quantum leap into biotechnology? We're grappling with these kinds of issues right now across the continent.

NEWS & VIEWS: What is the biggest challenge for African agriculture right now?

Looking holistically at the continent and the sector, I think probably our biggest challenge is to position the agriculture sector and negotiate that position in terms of global trends, because we cannot afford to be passive as a continent. We are a critical component of the global system of land, natural resource use, and food systems, but we need to establish and define a niche and negotiate for that niche. African agriculture needs to have an appropriate technology- transfer partnership with developed countries which facilitates economic growth by raising yields and incomes and at the same time satisfies food security at the household level, without compromising the sustainability of its biodiversity or the trade and new market opportunities that exist for its unique products. Linked to that of course is the economic and entrepreneurial character which African agriculture needs to take on and which has been latent in the past. There's a world of opportunity when you think of the combination of our rich biodiversity and new technologies. With the right minds thinking about things and coming together, I think it's a positive outlook. Our natural resources, in relation to the people we have to feed, have potential, but one needs to harness that capacity and negotiate that niche for the continent.