While hailing the estate as one of the most successful farming projects, Dr Zweli Mkhize committed himself and his cabinet to speeding up the agrarian revolution to ensure that agriculture becomes a catalyst for economic development.
“When we started this term of office, we committed ourselves to working with Amakhosi and communities to drive agrarian reform. As government we believe that significant impact will be made in the reduction of poverty and in job creation through agriculture.”
“The revival of Tugela Estate forms part of efforts aimed at promoting agriculture and to revive agriculture to become an important regional contributor to the Gross Domestic Product. Significant work has been done to link the subsistence and emerging farmers to the markets in the first economy.”
“The province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) has many under-used Land Reform Farms and Irrigation Schemes such as Tugela Estates, Texas Valley Farms and others. Government has previously invested heavily in infrastructure for the farms but this infrastructure has become run-down due to a lack of operating finances to maintain this infrastructure and carry out day-to-day farming activities.”
“Communities and farmers living on these schemes remain extremely poor and food insecure. Many potential investors have approached communities and government offering to form partnerships to produce crops. However they have all expected government to pay for infrastructure and operating finances.”
Few months ago KZN Government received proposals from “Healthy Agro” and “Heritage Dairies” from India. These proposals offers to provide operating finances for the proposed initiative if the landowners and farmers make land available, organises themselves into a community business entity and government funds infrastructure rehabilitation and repairs. Healthy Agro and Heritage dairies are the largest agricultural businesses in southern India. However, India lacks land to meet the food needs of their growing population.”
“Healthy Agro wishes to grow “Pulses” (Lentils, uBhontshisi) on 500ha of Tugela Estates. This crop will be exported to India and 30% of the profits will be paid to the Tugela Farmer’s Business Entity. Further, it wishes for the community farmers to grow 50ha of vegetables on the rest of the Scheme. It will buy vegetables from the community and all vegetable profits will go to the farmers.”
“Healthy Agro also wants government to buy 1 000 Dairy Cows for the community and Healthy Agro will train the farmers to take care of the cows and it will manage the Dairy Enterprise. Healthy Agro will facilitate sale of all milk across to Heritage Dairy and all profits from Milk Sales will go to the Farmers.”
Enquiries:
Ndabezinhle Sibiya
Spokesperson for the Premier
Cell: 082 3754742
