Agricultural policy in South Africa.

This Agricultural policy in South Africa is a sectoral document at the national level to establish an environment where opportunities for higher incomes and employment are created for resource-poor farmers alongside a thriving commercial farming sector. To do this, it set out three major goals for policy reform: to build an efficient and internationally competitive agricultural sector to support the emergence of a more diverse structure of production with a large increase in the numbers of successful smallholder farming enterprises.
It is equally important and critical to creat resilience by reducing risks in preserving and protecting crucial assets and options for food security - i.e. to strengthen the resilience of livelihoods systems to absorb (or cope) and recover in a sustainable way from the impacts of a calamity, reduce risks and mitigate future effects on their food and nutrition security and agro-ecosystems. Consequently, the formulated support to the most vulnerable (affected) farming communities will contribute to the overall achievement of three overarching objectives: Increased levels of food security and rehabilitation of rural livelihoods; Reduction of poverty, enhanced social cohesion and peaceful coexistence; Resilience capacity of affected communities and public sector to anticipate, absorb and recover from external pressures, shocks and crisis, including potential conflict and unrest.
In order to achieve these basic objectives in the areas most affected by the return process, the food security and sector rehabilitation response for agriculture should aim at: optimizing the utilization of resource endowments (sustainable natural resources management: water, land, forest) for increased productivity in agriculture (crops, livestock, and fisheries), and related income and employment on a cost-effective and sustainable basis; overcoming the status of stagnating production levels; based on a secure level of production for home consumption, the farming communities should be given the means to increase production volumes in order to benefit from existing and new markets inside and outside of their region (taking advantage of a value chain approach); and ensuring that emergency/short-term initiatives and medium-term rehabilitation/stabilization efforts are rationally combined in order to form a sound basis for the long-term development of the sector; in this respect, simultaneous institutional building and human resources development will be fundamental for creating the needed implementation capacity and lasting sustainability of public sector services provision, including for crisis prevention, preparedness and mitigation.