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date: 01 July 2022

Abstract and Keywords

South Africa is a semi-arid country with a weak resource base for agriculture which is also threatened by climate change and sporadic droughts. Through the adoption of modern technology, increased productivity growth and new export markets, South African commercial agriculture has shown dramatic growth over the last three decades. At the same time, the sector continues to be characterized by an extreme dualism between predominantly white commercial farmers and mainly black smallholder farmers, and many failed efforts to grow the sector in an inclusive and transformed manner. As a result, the country still has ‘two agricultures’. This chapter unpacks the structural characteristics of South African commercial agriculture based on a freighter-relation of the official statistics. This incomplete picture of the structural and geospatial dimensions of agriculture constrain any sensible policy design and support programmes to bring about a sustainable and transformed sector.

Keywords: agricultural production, economic contribution, farm structure, land reform, agricultural trade, food prices, agricultural policies

Wandile Sihlobo

Wandile Sihlobo is the chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and the author of Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity, and Agriculture (Pan Macmillan, 2020). He is a visiting research fellow at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand. He was appointed to Cyril Ramaphosa’s Presidential Economic Advisory Council in 2019. He served on the Presidential Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture. He is a member of the Council of Statistics of South Africa and a commissioner at the International Trade Commission of South Africa. He is a columnist for Business Day and Farmers Weekly.

Johann Kirsten

Johann Kirsten is professor and director of the Bureau for Economic Research (BER) at the University of Stellenbosch. He was previously a professor and head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Pretoria. He served as a council member of the National Agricultural Marketing Council in South Africa from 2001 to 2011 and was also appointed as chair of the Food Price Committee during 2003/4. He also served as the vice-president of the International Association of Agricultural Economists for the period 2006–9.

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