Collaborative stakeholder engagement is an essential driver of inclusivity and sustainability in the South African agricultural sector. Speaking in a discussion at the 2024 Trialogue Business in Society Conference, industry actors and thought leaders demonstrated the trickle-down effects of strategic collaborative efforts to create value in agriculture.
The FirstRand-sponsored panel included FirstRand Group head of social investing Kone Gugushe, Mohair Empowerment Trust (MET) head Beauty Mokgwamme, MET beneficiary and Geluk Farm farm manager Johnson Madlendoda and independent partnering and systems change practitioner Andrew Boraine.
SA agriculture needs transformation
A sustainable and profitable agricultural sector that achieves national food security would contribute to the systemic change needed to reduce poverty in South Africa. Speaking to the theory of change behind FirstRand’s approach to corporate social investment in agriculture, Gugushe explored some of the fundamental challenges facing the sector, particularly the need for greater inclusivity.
“For our business prosperity we need to ensure that there is inclusive growth,” she noted. FirstRand’s provision of innovative financial products and the extension of financial capital through collaborative programmes is based on the objectives of increasing the number of black commercial farmers, ensuring their ownership of land and improving agricultural practices to achieve commercial scalability.
The advanced average age of South African farmers and lack of interest from young people in farming presents a significant future problem, particularly in light of Africa’s future population projections. “If we are looking at how the population of Africa is going to grow, we have to get young people interested in contributing towards the sustainability of Africa as a whole. Agriculture has to be made more attractive,” she commented.
To this end, FirstRand contributes financing to young people to pursue education in farming and in agriculture-adjacent fields.
Strategic partnerships drive change
The financier is strategic in its approach, partnering with association bodies to identify the crops and commodities most likely to achieve high impact, supporting mentorship and skills development to achieve meaningful change for black farmers. One of these is the Mohair Empowerment Trust, which empowers emerging farmers to commercialisation, strengthening the country’s mohair industry in the process. South Africa is currently responsible for 50% of the world’s mohair production.
Mokgwamme says FirstRand’s intervention has enabled, among other things, the supply of interest-free loans to emerging farmers to be paid back over five-year period. Their support has helped to speed up the work of the MET, leading to an overall improvement of the angora goat genetics in the local industry, capacity building through training and increasing attention to adherence to the internationally recognised responsible mohair standard.
Madlendoda, who has benefited from the work of the MET and FirstRand’s support noted the importance of support from industry stakeholder in helping farmers through the long profit turnaround times and external shocks that challenge farmers.
Firstrand’s involvement has also helped the trust to reach small-scale angora goat farmers who, while they do not qualify for commercialisation, can benefit from value adds that improve their profits. “It’s a meaningful impact that we’ve seen in the lives of the people that we’re serving in this trust,” Mokgwamme commented.
Beyond production: the need for agri-systems food transformation
The panel also spoke to the broader challenge of food security facing South Africa. “Food security is about more than agricultural production.” Commenting on the greater importance of access to sufficient food and sufficient nutrition Boraine said, “We have a national crisis. One-in-four children are malnourished in our country.” He added that the long-term consequences this reality for children’s lives, their ability to learn, their health and future employment prospects, together with the fact that South Africa has not managed to shift this reality in the past 30 years, points to a deep systemic problem in our food system.
Boraine urged stakeholders to consider the many facets affecting national food security, from packaging and processing, storage and distribution, retail mark ups and markets – both formal and informal – to consumer habits, food waste management – with 40% of our food going to landfill – and the current and future effects of climate change on crop and livestock production.
He reinforced the need for collaborative efforts in support of South African food systems calling for more “transversal work” and the transformation of the system as a whole with a better governance framework to coordinates the food system rather than leaving it to market forces.
Such an approach would demand a systemic change not only in how top-down authorising and bottom-up mobilising environments operate within themselves, but how they relate to each other. Any change demands that authorising systems become more collaborative, reduce the effects of rank and status and regulatory compliance paralysis and work towards a more accessible system for those outside it. Meanwhile, the mobilising environment would benefit from reducing internal competition and finding ways to work together as non-profits, businesses, funders or donors, reinforcing the idea that “change starts from within,” Boraine concluded.
