Black economic empowerment (BEE) was an extremely poignant issue raised frequently throughout the allFresh! conference, and the message speakers made was clear - BEE is not an option, but a part of future business for agriculture, and its problems need to be addressed.
Introduced in 2003, BEE is a government initiative which works toward a vision of integration in the sector, with the emphasis on giving control to black farmers so that they may manage their own farms, contributing to the country’s economy and creating a middle class consumer base in the process.
The scheme aims to achieve this partially through three land-reform strategies. Firstly, land restitution is the returning of ancestral land to displaced communities and is not intended for commercial use. Tenure reform is another strategy, which aims to ensure dwellers with a long history of living on a particular farm are not removed from that land unfairly. And land redistribution where land is acquired by black people who intend to use it for commercial purposes only, is another.
Despite operating for two years and increasing awareness of BEE amongst the agricultural industry, speakers explained that the process was not moving fast enough in the right direction: “Where are the black farmers?” said Mohammed Karaan, chairman of the National Agricultural Marketing Council: “It is too much about workers and not enough about entrepreneurs,” he said.
Andrew Makenete, general manager of agribusiness at ABSA Bank echoed Karaan’s sentiments. He said the problems holding back BEE are deep-rooted: “South Africa sits on land yet black farmers don’t trade land, there’s a need to change policy framework in this sector, black people are just sitting on land with no value to it,” he said. “We need to overcome the legacy of debt capital haunting blacks in general, and the rural poor in particular.”
Denver Williams, general manager for transformation and training for the Deciduous Fruit Producers’ Trust, said the industry simply needs to take more notice of what was already in place, and was optimistic that BEE would succeed eventually:
“The black farms are there,” he said: “They need more exposure to international markets and the mainstream of business that is they need to be exposed to the nuts and bolts of their respective industry.”
He added: “The struggle will always continue between the haves and the have-nots. The real struggle however is to narrow the horizon between the two poles existing now and this is the challenge that is being faced by an industry on its knees. It’s a challenge that is not being shelved but is being faced head on.
“To address the challenge means that opportunities has to be created, and that is just what the DFPT is has achieved to a large degree and the challenge will continue infinitum.”
