The North West Premier, Maureen Modiselle, has reiterated her governments’ position to rural development by developing a comprehensive and clear rural development strategy to sustain decent livelihoods and promote the role of agriculture.
Delivering her State of the Province Address today in Mafikeng, the premier said the strategy would in the main be focused on food security and decent job creation and to this effect a pilot project had been launched at Mokgalanweng village in Moses Kotane.
Together with social and private sector partners in this field, a stakeholder driven intervention process has been created and this recognises the interests of both small and commercial farmer.
Modiselle says since the province is rural and also mainly an agricultural economy, they will only realise growth if they focus on creating rural and agriculture based industries.
“Since we remain a key component of the South African food chain particularly maize, beef and pork, it is no wonder that we have to date successfully implemented programmes such as the Mechanisation of Rural Farming, Western Frontier Beef Beneficiation, Taung Irrigation Scheme, Nguni Cattle and the Multi-purpose Livestock Handling facilities. Our agricultural industry development programme has to date focused on smaller farmer development and 600 farmers have already been trained in beef beneficiation and this will be expounded to pork beneficiation.
“Regarding conservation and environment we have geared our intervention towards supporting both local economic development and biodiversity conservation. The Magalies Biosphere project, the Hartbeespoort Dam Remediation programme and the cradle of Humankind Word heritage corridor programme remain our flagship conservation driven tourist attraction programmes,” said Modiselle.
She said to mitigate the effects of climate change, they would be interfacing with research institutions within and outside the province to start a programme to create a large number of green jobs in industries thus support their commitment as a country to Kyoto and Copenhagen agreements.
We have consequently developed an agricultural master plan that will provide the vegetation demographics of the province. The plan will direct provincial planning in terms of infrastructure deployment in support of agricultural industry creation, said Modiselle.
For more information, contact:
Kgotso Khumalo
Cell: 082 7288 400
Tel: 018 387 3456
E-mail: khumalok@nwpg.gov.za
Issued by the North West Provincial Government
25 February 2010
