Political Parties, elections and agriculture

Like 65 other countries South Africa will have general elections this year. 52 political parties are competing for the national vote. How is an electorate being stretched economically (Neethling, 2024) likely to vote? And of particular interest to us, how does agriculture feature in the bouquet of choices on offer?

One challenge in a democracy is to maintain a sense of unity. A national sports team can help with this, as can facing a common enemy like a natural disaster or epidemic. We remember and (mostly) celebrate these times.

Unfortunately it is in the interests of people not in power to play down good news, to exploit discontent, just as it is in the interests of those in power to make people feel that their lives are okay and that much has been accomplished. Us-them models help enormously in creating blame, focusing blame or shifting blame.

Land (and by implication, agriculture) could feature as a rallying cry. It is an emotive issue, and the farming community can be a convenient punching bag.

From the left we will hear calls for the confiscation of agricultural land. Parties more towards the centre advocate a land audit or economic indaba so that a clear picture emerges. Or they will go straight to placing a focus on the distribution of arable state land be this national, provincial or district. Some 25% of farmland is now owned by black South Africans, the goal of 30% by 2030 being pursued by orderly means remains achievable after all. Parties on the right pay scant attention to all this. Their focus is strictly on land rights and commercial sustainability. They will lament the comparative lack of support and subsidies from government. Agriculture is what makes society possible (because people are released from growing their own food and get on with other careers). This is scarcely acknowledged.

Inputs are expensive and agriculture requires a lot of capital upfront. You need money to make money, as some would say. Land is used as collateral in commercial agriculture, and this (mostly successful) form of agriculture would cease to exist in a scenario of expropriation of land without compensation, with most value chains being wiped away. That is upstream (businesses selling machinery, seeds, chemicals and other inputs) and downstream (processing and adding value – find the many Agribook pages here).

The stories of the centuries tell us that mostly we overlook our oneness, our all being in the same boat. Moving ahead for one group is not moving ahead if it is at the expense of another, and decisions come back to haunt us long after they are made. Do we have centuries still to learn this?

Photo by Damian Siodłak on Unsplash

Further reference:

• Food for Mzansi has run an article “Election promises: How parties plan to reshape SA’s agriculture” in which political parties gave their view.
• Directly related to agriculture, of course, is food security, and here we refer readers to GroundUp’s “Elections 2024: What the major political parties say about hunger“.