Blog

As we enter the second month of the new year, and South Africa continues to be hit with stages four, five and six of load-shedding, I am reminded that 2024 is now only 11 months away, and there are many things that government must act on to ensure that 2023, 2024 and the years to come are successful ones for the agriculture sector.

In Parliament recently, DA leader John Steenhuisen asked how bad South Africa’s crime statistics needed to be before President Cyril Ramaphosa replaced Bheki Cele as minister of police.

In the 6 & 13 January 2023 issue of Farmer's Weekly, we provide our readers with an outline of the agricultural landscape for the New Year, as well as analysts’ predictions in terms of upcoming local production seasons and commodity prices.

I have made no secret of the fact that I find the world’s treatment of farmers deplorable. This treatment of the people who produce our food and the fibre for our clothing, as well as employ vast swathes of the world’s population, is particularly egregious when it comes to governments.

The UN’s Conference of the Parties (COP27) ran from 6 to 18 November and was held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. On the agenda, as always, was climate change.

The year is certainly flying by at lightning speed, and it’s incredible that we are already entering the annual cycle of agricultural shows in South Africa.

It has been almost 13 years since I wrote my first stories for Farmer’s Weekly as a freelance journalist, and now, as we start a new year, the time has come for me to start something new.

South Africa’s local government elections will take place on 1 November. One of the core functions of municipalities is to provide services such as refuse removal, the upkeep of certain roads, and the provision of water and electricity.

I know ignorance is a poor and cowardly excuse. However, as someone born in the early 1980s, I was oblivious when growing up of the terrible and unfair reality that most South Africans were subjected to at the time.

One of the enviable things about South Africans is that just about every one of us speaks at least two languages, while many speak and understand three, four or even more.

Property rights or, more specifically, the power of the state to deprive a person of these rights, have been high on Parliament’s agenda these past few weeks as committees heard oral submissions from the public on the Expropriation Bill and also on the Draft Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill, which concerns amendments to Section 25 of the Constitution in term of expropriation.

You might have read, in media reports that have been circulating on social media these past few weeks, about the case of Western Cape farmer Ivan Cloete, a land reform beneficiary who was facing eviction from a farm he was previously granted access to by the state.