Millions of South Africans go to sleep hungry – Minister

Orlando Chauke

LIMPOPO – THE deputy minister for agriculture, forestry and fisheries, Bheki Cele urged young people in South African to take farming seriously rather than to rely on government and the private sector to employ them.

Addressing youth and farmers during the recent Limpopo Youth Agricultural Summit at Turfloop Nature Reserve, Cele said 14 million South Africans went to bed without food.

“As we stand here, all of us are being charged with the responsibility of providing enough food for South Africans and create one million jobs by 2020,” explained Cele, saying the third charge was that the agricultural sector should contribute 6% to the country’s GDP as demanded by president Jacob Zuma.

“Now, if we have 14 million people out of the country’s 53.7 million going to bed without food everyday while most of us here can afford three meals a day, you can ask yourself whether we’re guilty as charged or not,” he said, urging young people to help increase the agricultural sector’s contribution to GDP from the current 2.7% to 6%.

Cele also warned about “satellite farming”, where people owned farms, but lived far away from them, saying this led to failure.

“What these young people should understand is that there’s no cell phone farming on earth, where you’d find somebody from Soweto calling to find out about the progress of their farm in the Vhembe district. You would have to move and live there so that you wake up every morning close to your cattle, chickens and pigs if you want to be a successful farmer,” he said.

He went further and urged young people to also consider subsistence and household farming so that they could contribute to food security in the country through the selling of their surplus food to the market or communities.

“There’s money that is called CASP or Comprehensive, Agricultural Support Programme that government is presently giving out to family farmers in order to help them produce sustainable household foods,” he explained.

“If it happens that you produce more than you can consume, you can simply go to the market to sell your products,” he said.

Supporting the deputy minister’s statement, the MEC for agriculture, Joy Matshoge said the department has helped many farmers in as far as subsistence farming was concerned.

“However, the challenges that we face as a department is that the number of farmers who need help keeps on growing more than the funds allocated for the programme,” she said.

One of the beneficiaries of government’s agricultural asistance programme, Makungu Mabunda from Giyani, who was also one of the nominees at the 2015 Young Aspirant Farmer of the Year Awards, thanked government for helping him, saying he could not have done it if it were not for government’s support.

“Most of the infrastructure on my farm such as the irrigation pipes and many other farming tools were acquired through funding from the department of agriculture,” he said.