THE CORNUCOPIA THAT'S TAKEN FOR GRANTED
Governments are today being brought down due to food price increases. In some countries there are actual food shortages: a few years ago, Egyptians stormed bread stores when their traditional flat bread ran out.
The president of Tunisia has had to flee to Saudi Arabia on a midnight plane while his
political colleagues have been arrested. Joblessness, media tyranny and rising food and petrol prices took their toll on a frustrated population. The collapse of the government has precipitated a shortage of vegetables, tinned food, bread and petrol.
In Algeria, the largest country in the Mediterranean in respect of land area, food subsidies on sugar and oil were recently cut, and deadly riots erupted, with many killed. Nearly 25% of Algerians live below the poverty line, while around nine million - a quarter of the population - are employed in the agricultural sector. The French colonialists sank artesian wells and increased food production dramatically - in 1962, the European population was 15% of the total. After the French departure, socialism and collectivized agriculture ensured a radical drop in production levels, which have only recently improved due to a partially freed-up economy. (South Africa is the only country on the African continent to export serious quantities of food yet, ironically, our government wants to transform our agriculture into a socialistic model which failed in Algeria and has failed all over the world.)
The SA Minister of Agriculture recently stated commercial farmers are leaving South Africa because of crime: she implied they are fleeing their homeland. TAU SA says however it is the government that is chasing them away. Its policies make it harder and harder to stay on a commercial farm - the uncertainly of land reform, threats of expropriation, the granting of permanent residence to aliens on farms, a deteriorating infrastructure, unfriendly and even antagonistic labour laws, polluted water for agricultural purposes and onerous water taxes. And the murder of farmers continues unabated.
It is as if the government has a death wish for all of us! A mindset of self-destruction comes to mind - not unfamiliar to Africa where those who cut down trees wonder why there is soil erosion and parched lands, where those who burn down the schools criticize a poor educational system, and those who steal from the country's fiscus wonder why there is no money for libraries and school feeding schemes!
CORNUCOPIA
South Africa's food cornucopia is evident at every shopping mall, at every wholesale market, and across the fields and farms of the country. South Africa 's fruit and vegetable retail sector has metamorphosed into a food lover's paradise. One recent addition to this retail super-abundance in an up-market Pretoria suburb sells mountains of fresh food - its 3 500 sq. metre food hall is replete with high stacks of fruit and vegetables of every description, with row upon row of fresh meat of every type - marinades, ribs, sosaties and processed meat from SA and all over the world. There is fresh fish in abundance: breads, cakes and pizzas of every description abut European and South African cheeses, while antipasta bars, tapas bars, pizza bars, sushi bars and even boerewors bars cater to the sit-down-and-eat crowd. Fresh flowers jostle with health foods, exotic nuts and coffee from around the world, with beans, barley and rye, and with pulses no one has ever heard of!
How many South African government officials really appreciate what South Africa 's 35 000 farmers and world-class retailers are doing to keep this country's 50 million people not only fed, but bounteously fed? (There are 630 000 farms in Germany serving a population of 82 million, while 500 000 French farms serve 65 million people). How many of our elected elite bear in mind it is the South African farmer who provides for the sumptuous dinners, the conference lunches, and the privately catered functions which these officials enjoy with such a sense of entitlement?
On the African continent, for example, where will you overhear words similar to those of the South African shopper declaring to her daughter that "there's no more room in the fridge" to buy that melon, or that green pepper, or that extra steak!
Do the public and the government think this cornucopia will continue forever? Given the outright antagonism displayed towards the country's commercial farming sector by a dangerously ignorant and ideologically-obsessed ANC government, is it any wonder some farmers look abroad to secure their future? (And isn't South Africa fortunate it's not the ANC in charge of producing the country's food!)
FOOD SURVIVAL
Recent floods in the Australian state of Queensland expose the soft-underbelly of world food production. Australia is the world's fourth-biggest wheat exporter, and on January 3, the price of wheat rose to a five-month high as fears of grain losses in Queensland and a cold snap in the US threatened this crop. Futures prices rose immediately with just a hint of shortages imminent. Wheat had already climbed 47% last year, as adverse weather cut production in Russia . The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization said this month that prices for wheat, rice, maize and other cereals had outstripped the 2008 crisis levels that sparked riots across the world.
South Africa is part and parcel of the planet's most hungry continent. It is a beacon shining in an ever-darkening firmament. Those who make it so should be nurtured and cherished. One in three Africans is chronically hungry, despite $3 billion spent on food aid for the continent annually and $33 billion in food imports. The population is not decreasing. Harvard University says Sudan alone could feed all of Africa if it were properly developed. The number of under-nourished Africans has increased by 100 million since 1990, yet around 70% of Africans are involved in agriculture. (If Africa cannot feed itself, why does the SA government believe that local productive-farm transferees will do better?)
A recent graph published by "Building an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa" shows sub-Saharan Africa once again at the bottom of the pile - from 1960 to 2005, every other region in the world increased its per capita food production, while sub-Saharan African figures dropped below the original sixties colonial benchmark.
We have written about government self-delusion on several occasions, but the most dangerous example is the treatment of South Africa 's commercial farmers. These farmers are expected to continue producing at current levels, come what may!
In a continent where "putting away for a rainy day" is a foreign concept, where "maintenance", "forward planning" and "budgetary constraints" are just words, food shortages and their corollary, civil unrest, seem nigh.
If South Africa 's farmers go on strike as do the rest of society, has the government prepared Plan B to feed 50 million people? When the Department of Land Reform mulls over expropriation, gives occupational legality to farm workers, taxes precious agricultural water and pollutes the rest, are three meals a day for the population uppermost in its mind? If it isn't, then we must seriously worry. Cornucopia will be just another complicated word in the dictionary!
This article first published in the international bulletin of TAU SA, January 18 2011
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