Speech By KZN Department of Agriculture and Rural Development MEC, Mr Cyril Xaba at the Women Economic Empowerment Summit, Msunduzi City Hall
Program Director
Msunduzi Executive Committee Member, Ms Jabu Ngubo
Mayor of Mpofana and the President of Women in Agriculture and Rural Development, Cllr Maureen Magubane
South African National Military Veterans
Association Chairperson, Ms Sibongile Mkhize
Representatives of Ithala Financial Institution
Representatives of Community and Women’s Organisations
Ladies and Gentlemen
I was asked to speak to you on what the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (KZN DARD) is doing about women economic empowerment.
The answer is simple and straightforward – Everything we do in the department – every one of our efforts is concentrated on women economic empowerment. Let me explain how and why this is being done so that those of you who want to become agricultural entrepreneurs will know what we have to offer you.
The department has a mandate as set out by the National Development Plan (NDP) to grow agriculture so that it contributes to food security, job creation and building the rural economy.
In both 2015 and 2016, His Excellency President Jacob Zuma in his State of the Nation Speeches said that the revitalisation of agriculture and Agro-Processing value chain was the top priority in a nine-point plan to fast-track economic growth in the country. The KZN DARD took these mandates and other polices and crafted a Strategy for Agrarian Transformation in the Province.
In developing this strategy, we came across some uncomfortable facts that would have to be confronted if we wanted to create a better life for our people. A study commissioned by KwaZulu-Natal Premier, Mr Senzo Mchunu, as part of his Poverty Eradication Master Plan found that KwaZulu-Natal has the highest gender based poverty incidence and the second highest level of rural poverty in South Africa.
In other words, the face of poverty in our province is that of a rural woman. According to the last census, KwaZulu-Natal also has the highest percentage of subsistence farmers in the country.
Research done by the President’s office revealed that 61% of these subsistence farmers are women. Given this background, we realised that if we wanted to transform agriculture in the province and ensure that it becomes a catalyst for economic growth, we would have to unleash the power of our women subsistence farmers.
This is why I said in the introduction that everything we do in the department revolves around women empowerment. The biggest challenge that our women subsistence farmers face, is the economies of scale. With their small plots they will always struggle to compete with their commercial counterparts who farm over vast areas.
Then there are the issues of accessing quality seed and livestock. Having infrastructure support and access to markets. The Strategy for Agrarian Transformation seeks to create an environment to assist those who want to be empowered who want to move from being subsistence to commercial farmers, who want to become entrepreneurs and operate in the first economy. In setting up this strategy, we were mindful of international studies that showed evidence from other African countries, Asia and Latin America that lives improve and families benefit when women are empowered.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that if women had the same access to resources worldwide, their yields could increase by up to 30%, which could result in up to 150 million fewer people going hungry.
The Africa director of ONE, an international campaign to end poverty and preventable diseases, said and I quote, “If governments and partners invest in agriculture, and in particular, its women farmers today, they can be assured of a legacy of greater equality and boundless opportunity that will benefit Africans for generations to come and may usher the beginning of the end of aid dependence for our people.” As part of our strategy for agrarian transformation, KZN DARD has taken a number of bold steps to invest in our women farmers. To begin with, we have restructured our department so that more power devolves to the District Offices.
The District Manager oversees a team of specialists from scientists, agronomists, livestock specialists, soil scientists, business specialists who are all there to help the farmers. These specialists serve a team of professional extension officers who are the link between the farmers, agro-processors and the department. Our aim is to always have support at hand whether it is for a Gogo managing her small household garden or a cooperative managing their communal farm.
The key word here is support. In the past as government we made the mistake of doing the farming for the farmers and people grew dependent on always being helped and being bailed out off difficult situations. Now with the new strategy, we are supplying you with support and the tools of farming.
Our women farmers are being taught both the business and science of agriculture. I am proud to say that our women in agriculture are thriving and we have a number of success stories to tell.
These stories which I will relate later, will hopefully inspire other women to take up the business of agriculture. Before I go into this, let me explain in more detail as to how you can get help. I salute Ms Sibongile Mkhize as a military veteran and I know that she has enquired about military veterans getting help. With the current drought, a major concern in the department is the rising cost of meat, fruit and vegetables.
As a department we are committed to doubling up the numbers of household food gardens, community gardens and institutional gardens across the districts. We are not going to be dishing out seeds in the hope that people will establish gardens.
We are offering a starter pack including seeds, broiler chickens and goats. In addition, there will be skills training and support. It is up to the household to use this help just to feed their family or to join in with other households in the community and to develop an enterprise where they will not only feed their family but sell the excess produce, locally or to bigger markets. So you can start with a household garden and develop this into a much bigger enterprise.
This assistance is not just about producing a product. KZN DARD has a section called “Value-Add,” where we are helping farmers find ways to process their products and sell these on the market, for example turning groundnuts into peanut butter or peanut sweets, making pickles, jams and preserves and other products that can be sold to a wider market.
According to research, what holds subsistence farmers back is the lack of infrastructure such as silos and abattoirs and pack-houses.
The department is actively engaged in supplying this infrastructure. A bigger hurdle is the lack of business knowledge and access to funding to be able to compete fairly in the commercial agricultural arena. To bridge the divide, KZN DARD has created a new unit known as the Business Entities and Social Organisation unit which falls under the Rural Enterprise and Industrial Development Directorate.
This directorate is dedicated to building farmer entrepreneurs and because the majority of our subsistence farmers are women, we are building up the women farmer entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
This directorate is dedicated to support the business enterprises of women farmers and agro-processors, by offering training and mentorship. As we sit at this conference there are three KwaZulu-Natal women farmers in Cape Town receiving business management and marketing training from the National Agricultural Marketing Council.
Any one of you here who has a good plan to develop a farming enterprise or who wants to just begin by getting help with a household garden, please contact the local KZN DARD office in your district. As I said, they are there to bring our services closer to our people. I am often asked about opportunities within the Agri-Parks that are being developed in the different districts.
There will be plenty of opportunities. Let me explain - the Agri-Parks do not operate in isolation, they form part of the work of all government departments at national, provincial and municipal level. I recently told the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform, the Honourable Mr Gugile Nkwinti that for the first time we are seeing a coordinated approach to agricultural development in the Districts.
National and Provincial initiatives are talking to and linking up with Municipal IDP’s and local economic development strategies.
We are seeing the end of duplication and wasting of resources. The aim of the Agri-Parks is also to work towards the economy of scale with different agri-parks concentrating on different commodities. So the farmers in that district will be encouraged to grow and process that commodity. In turn, the farmers will get support by way of ease of access to production inputs, mechanisation, necessary agricultural infrastructure agro-logistics, participating in agro-processing and in access to markets.
The Agri-Parks will also be linked with other farming enterprises such as land reform farms, agricultural enterprises on communal estates, River Valley catalytic projects – which are all part of the Strategy for Agrarian Transformation in the Province.
Another example of women empowerment is that the majority of cooperatives running farming enterprises on our communal estates are managed and made up of women farmers. If you are interested in finding out more about the Agri-Park initiatives, speak to the local economic development unit at your municipality.
The Agri-Park intiatives which will be based in ten district municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal, must not be mistaken with the Agri-Village project. The AgriVillage project is being piloted in the Emadlangeni Municipality and involves all provincial departments and can be described as an Agri-Park on a much larger scale which will involve laying out a whole village supported by agricultural production. All that I have said so far may have sounded very theoretical but we have success stories that the Strategy is working and we are building our numbers of women entrepreneurial farmers.
Earlier this year, we held a Goat Expo and Goat meat cooking competition.
The majority of our poverty-stricken women in rural areas are goat farmers and the Expo formed part of the launch of the KZN Goat Master Plan. The aim is that within the next five years we will be helping 7000 mainly women goat farmers to move from subsistence to commercial goat production, aiming ultimately at exporting goat meat to the Middle East where it is considered a delicacy. We have already had a secondary spinoff from this initiative.
The Cooperatives that took part in the goat cooking competition have felt sufficiently empowered that they have formed themselves into a group to do cooking demonstrations and to become marketers of goat meat. The Female Entrepreneur Program run in conjunction with the National Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is producing a number of women agricultural entrepreneurs.
For example, business woman Busi Lubanyane from the Ugu District is currently exporting macadamia nuts to the United States, Europe and the Far East. She started off in 2008 at the bottom of the Female Entrepreneur Programme where she won the subsistence category for tomato farming.
She won and invested her R75 000 prize money in her farm. Ms Lubanyane was assisted by the department and the Agribusiness Development Agency (ADA) by being provided with intensive training through the Perishable Product Export Board Council. She also underwent training in financial management, agribusiness and marketing matters.
This training allowed her to move into the commercial sector. In 2010 she entered the Female Entrepreneur Awards in the commercial category and came second. Once again this enterprising woman farmer invested her prize money into her farm, this time to grow macadamia nuts.
ADA assisted with infrastructure and today Ms Lubanyane is the first black woman farmer from KwaZulu-Natal to supply macadamias for the export market. From her story, it is worth noting that success does not come overnight. It takes hard work, passion, sacrifice and dedication.
It took six years for Ms Lubanyane to graduate from being a subsistence producer to a qualified export farmer. Ladies and Gentlemen I am most excited that an important part of KZN DARD’s work is the development of young people and growing our future farmers. It is exciting to see that many of our young agricultural graduates are women.
The department is committed to ensuring that these young people get jobs and opportunities to become entrepreneurs within the agricultural sector. We have launched a graduate placement program, under the theme, “Bringing Agricultural land Back into Production.” We are working with financial institutions, commodity organisation, commercial farmers to not only ensure job creation but to grow our agricultural entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
For more information on this program please visit our website at: www.kzndard.gov.za .So you can see KZN DARD is committed to women economic empowerment – we are levelling the playing field and improving opportunities for women farmers. Ladies and Gentlemen we are well aware that we ignore the gender gap at our own peril.
Ignoring women undermines agriculture’s potential to drive inclusive economic growth of our rural areas, improve food security and create jobs and business opportunities for our younger generation.
I thank you.
