AGRICULTURE NEWS - Farmers are fuming about the Agricultural and Agro-processing Master Plan (Aamp) that was signed behind their backs and without any of their submissions and concerns being considered.
Southern African Agri Initiative (Saai) chair Theo de Jager said Aamp was a master plan “without farmers”, adding there was nothing in that plan to excite primary producers.
“Their principal objection is that profitability, sustainability, and value-chain efficiency are not meaningfully addressed in the Aamp text.
“Transformation can never be more important than profitability or sustainability. When transformation is elevated above sustainability, you get Eskom’s load-shedding era, or the current state of public health care.
“When it trumps profitability, you end up where the SABC and Denel are today,” De Jager said.
None of the stakeholders who, alongside the DA in 2022 criticised Aamp, were invited to the Aamp executive oversight meeting yesterday in Stellenbosch.
Exclusion of key sectors
“No progress has been made on earlier promises to include the wildlife ranching industry, or even to solicit its input,” he said.
“The objecting organisations maintain positions which were fundamentally wrong under an ANC minister do not become acceptable simply because the current minister is from the DA.
“They also question the mandate of Aamp signatories who claim to represent farmers.”
De Jager said the organisations that rejected the Aamp met three times with the department of agriculture and SOEs, as well as with Aamp signatories and tabled nine formal objections, of which none have been addressed.
De Jager said TLU-SA was invited again after being expelled from the 2022 signing ceremony for seeking clarity on the term “transformation”, which appears 92 times in the master plan.
TLU-SA chair Bennie van Zyl said it was a concern for the union where the decision-making is directed by the ANC.
“Unfortunately, we are trapped in a country where ideology plays a bigger role than economy. When the department admits that 95% of the land they transferred from commercial farmers, as the transformation agenda did not go through final production, then there is a mistake,” he said.
Farmers highlight ignored proposals
“In 2008, we submitted good proposals to the department on how work can be done to ensure that new entrants get a fair chance to succeed.
“The fact that our farmers were a net exporter of food says our farmers can still put food on the table.”
Van Zyl said they were concerned that the plan A focuses on six very good pillars, but is made subservient to transformation.
“It was our input: let’s define transformation in the economy, then we don’t have a problem, but they simply circumvented it.”
Van Zyl said the department went behind their backs and organised a signing off without any farmers.
Free State cattle farmer Tewie Wessels said: “The foot-in-mouth disease could have been resolved already if they wanted it resolved, but they have no will. It’s the same with the safety issues; it’s all promises and at the end of the day, nothing happens.
“Now, you wonder if these regulations they want to implement, if they will be able to pull it off,” Wessels said.
Article: Caxton publication, The Citizen
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