The future of SA's smallholder farmers

Klara Fischer, associate professor in Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, explains why South Africans are abandoning smallholder farming and how the trend can be reversed.

- Klara Fischer

"South African smallholders are abandoning farming. The decline in field cultivation is a problem, since many of these smallholder households struggle to make ends meet. If people were able to produce more of their own food, this would improve their lives.

The current situation is a combined effect of the country's historical legacy and the negative impacts of recent agricultural programmes on many smallholders' ability to farm. Understanding these reasons is an essential starting point for reversing the decline.

This article draws on work reported in three papers published in the journals Geoforum, Agrekon and Journal of Rural Studies. It is based on research I undertook in villages in OR Tambo District, South Africa, between 2006 and 2020, two household surveys from 2008 and 2020, and perspectives from South African history.

In the villages where my research is located, the number of fields in cultivation declined from 50% of fields in 2008 to 15% in 2019. This is representative of what can be seen in several South African smallholder communities today.

In the district, 66,5% of the population lived below the lower poverty line in 2019. These are households where basic needs cannot always be met.

Poverty and food insecurity have increased since the Covid-19 pandemic. Most households rely on a combination of social grants, self-employment and some food grown in their gardens. Most households have access to a field in a communal area, but these are rarely planted today. For the past 20 years there have been repeated government interventions to support farming, but despite this, fewer farmers plant their fields now than 15 years ago when I started my research.