that the national agricultural body ‘has now finally sold out the commercial agricultural industry to the ANC government with its destructive socialist ideology’.
So said independent agricultural economist Fanie Brink. He was responding to the Netwerk24 report, ‘Tyd is reg vir landbou, regering om hande te vat’, on Agri SA’s annual congress, conducted online last week.
‘Agri SA clearly has just as little idea as the government about what the primary economic goals of the agricultural industry are and how they can be achieved,’ he said.
These were to promote the profitability and sustainability of commercial agricultural production based on acceptable, scientific and economic principles to ensure the financial survival of producers; to support and promote the agricultural industry through the application of the latest technological development to ensure food security for the country that can only be sustainable if food production is profitable, and to establish a political and economic policy environment within which agriculture must be enabled to improve the industry and make a greater contribution to economic growth, profitability and sustainability.
Cooperating with the government in light of its ‘destructive socialist economic policies can in no way be an objective of organized agriculture’.
To date, such cooperation had had nil benefit for agriculture, while the government’s ‘interference has seriously threatened the survival of the industry through, among other things, land expropriation without compensation, minimum wages, the absence of any drought relief, higher taxes, and the destruction of the economy in general’.
Brink added: ‘The very serious fiscal problems such as larger budget deficits and government debt, as well as the social problems such as poverty, famine, unemployment and inequality are purely the responsibility of the government which it has in fact dramatically exacerbated in recent years, and which resulted in the recent serious riots and looting of the economy.’
‘Transformation’ of agriculture on the government’s terms would only ‘destroy food security and result in an exodus of thousands of farm workers and their families’.
‘Organised agriculture is not supposed to support and propagate the government’s failed policies, and help implement its destructive policies, but to take up the industry’s goals, which are seriously threatened, with the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with a view to finding solutions,’ Brink said.