Pretoria - The KwaZulu-Natal provincial government has committed to speeding up the agrarian revolution to ensure that agriculture becomes a catalyst for economic development.
Premier Zweli Mkhize on Thursday said a significant impact will be made on the reduction of poverty and on job creation through agriculture.
This emerged after Mkhize and several members of his provincial cabinet today, visited the Tugela Estate Project in Weenen, Umtshezi Local Municipality.
“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,” said Mkhize
“The province of KwaZulu-Natal has many underused 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.”
A few months ago, KZN government received proposals from Healthy Agro and Heritage Dairies from India. These proposals offer to provide operating finances for the proposed initiative if the landowners and farmers make land available, organize 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 and beans) 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 the sale of all milk across to Heritage Dairy and all profits from milk sales will go to the farmers,” said Mkhize. – SAnews.gov.za
