Farming In South Africa

This book provides a synthesis of the key issues and challenges facing agriculture and food production in Southern Africa. Southern Africa is facing numerous challenges from diverse issues such as agricultural transformations, growing populations, urbanization and climate change. These challenges place great pressure on food security, agriculture, water availability and other natural resources, as well as impacting biodiversity. Drawing on case studies from Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the chapters in this book consider these challenges from an interdisciplinary perspective, covering key areas in constraints to production, the most important building blocks of good farming practices, and established and emerging technologies. This book will be a valuable support for informing new policies and processes aimed at improving food production and security and developing sustainable agriculture in Southern Africa. This informative volume will be key reading for those interested in agricultural science, African studies, rural studies, development studies and sustainability. It will also be a valuable resource for policymakers, governmental and nongovernmental organizations, and agricultural practitioners. This title has been made available as Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CCBY-NC-ND) license and can be accessed here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429401701

Gives a historical overview of all aspects of farming in South Africa, practices followed, and includes colour photographs. Publication will aid learners with primary education assignments.

The fiercely contested issue of land reform is crucial to the success of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. In this broad-ranging yet rigorous study, leading researchers provide the theoretical framework and a major South African land reform initiative. The book places the issue of land at the center of the debate about the RDP; provides comprehensive coverage of the latest research findings, policies, and proposals; gives a clear understanding of the arguments around land reform, and of the principles underlying a market-assisted redistribution process; and analyzes international experience, and the South African policy and legal environment, in order to evaluate land reform options and make far-reaching proposals. Scholarly and topical, Agricultural Land Reform in South Africa is an indispensable resource for academics, students, development economists, practitioners and policy makers, and will be valuable in the development of agricultural land reform programs both local and international.

November 1995 Commercial farms in South Africa could become significantly more efficient if they became smaller. The government could encourage that trend by removing policies and distortions that favor large over small farms. Drawing on international evidence, van Zyl, Binswanger, and Thirtle discuss the sources of economies of scale. Using representative farm-level survey data for South Africa's six major grain-producing areas and one irrigation area for the period 1975 - 90, they: * Describe the structure of South African agriculture, detailing the distribution of farm sizes and results from previous studies of farm-size efficiency. * Analyze the evidence on scale efficiency in the former homelands. * Analyze the relationship between farm size and efficiency in commercial farming and discuss how policy affects that relationship. Clearly policy has a crucial impact on the relationship between farm size and efficiency. They find that: * Farms in the former homelands seem to be scale-inefficient, which is unsurprising, given the historical lack of access to support services and infrastructure, policies that discriminate against farmers in the homelands, and the extremely fragmented and limited land-use rights of farmers there. * There is an inverse relationship between farm size and efficiency in the commercial farming areas for the range of farms analyzed, regardless what method is used. This inverse relationship seems to become stronger and more accentuated as policy distortions -- which tend to favor large farms over small ones -- are removed. * Large farms tend to use more capital-intensive methods of production, while smaller farms are more labor-intensive. And managerial ability seems to be better on larger farms. There is an inverse relationship between farm size and efficiency in South African agriculture despite South Africa's history of policies favoring relatively large mechanized farms. Clearly, efficiency gains could be significant if commercial farms became smaller. To encourage that trend, policies and distortions that favor large farms over small should be removed. This paper -- a product of the Office of the Director, Agriculture and Natural Resources Department -- is part of a larger effort in the department to design appropriate strategies for land reform.

This title was first published in 2001. "This is also a study of rural Xhosa identity and community, and its survival in the face of the overwhelming odds stacked against it by colonialism and apartheid. The maintenance of homestead production can be properly understood only if this wider context is taken into consideration. The analysis is thus directly relevant to current debates about agrarian change, land reform and economic development in South Africa's communal areas, since it shows how some rural Xhosa are able to maintain a sense of community and identity, and of how they are able to harness the socio-cultural resources at their disposal to engage in productive activity, with some success."--BOOK JACKET.

The paper looks primarily at recent examples of agricultural practices in which resource-poor agrarian householders have used their indigenous knowledge, as well as innovations to overcome many of the socioeconomic, political and environmental constraints they experience.