As many as 300,000 new jobs in agriculture are “hiding in plain sight” if the government could provide the right support to farmers to grow the right products, says a top adviser to the department of trade and industry in a paper published this week.
Nimrod Zalk, an advisor to the department and formerly a top official for many years, says that SA needs to turn its attention to high-value horticulture such as the cultivation of fresh flowers, tomatoes, carrots, cherries, strawberries and avocados, among other fruit and vegetables which are highly labour-intensive and for which global demand is growing.
Employment in agriculture, says Zalk, could be expanded by 25%.
SA faces an unemployment crisis with 29% of adults who are actively seeking work unable to find it. If those who are discouraged from looking for work are included, then the unemployment rate rises to 38.5%. Large contractions of the number employed in agriculture have occurred over the past three decades.
“As SA searches for interventions that could generate large-scale employment, effect structural and racial transformation and grow exports, a fundamental opportunity to realise these objectives is hiding in plain sight.
“There is a large-scale but overlooked opportunity to promote the growth of high-value agricultural products that are both labour-intensive and export-oriented,” Zalk wrote in a paper published in his personal capacity on online economics forum Econ3X3.
Agriculture in SA is dominated by maize, wheat, poultry and beef, which lend themselves to large-scale operations, mechanisation and low labour intensity. Of the 10-million hectares under cultivation in SA, 9.5-million are for products such as these. But high-value fruits and vegetables that cannot easily be mechanised are 80 times more labour-intensive than most field crops. This factor rises to 160 times for the most labour-intensive products such as pawpaws, bananas, avocados, tomatoes, flowers and cherries.
But for horticulture to take off in such a way that hundreds of thousands of jobs can be created, it requires a number of co-ordinated policy interventions and support programmes from the state. These include: long-term certainty on land reform and long-dated loans for farmers because of the amount of time taken to produce fruit; much more expenditure by the state on research and development and public infrastructure, such as irrigation, as well as lower costs and more efficient transport networks and trade diplomacy.
Zalk says he wrote the paper to make people aware “of the compromises and accommodations that are necessary if you are to prioritise employment".
Apart from agro-processing, which is about adding value to agricultural products through manufacturing, agriculture does not fall under the industrial policy action plans developed by the department of trade and industry.
At the Jobs Summit a year ago, which put together a plan on how to create jobs in the economy, the social partners agreed on the potential to expand horticultural trade. However, the document is not specific and makes no mention of the labour-intensive products that could be rich in jobs and exports.
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