Deputy President Paul Mashatile said on Thursday that the government is playing a crucial role in ensuring that small farmers become sustainable and thriving enterprises, aligned to the country’s land reform and rural development objectives.

Responding during the question-and-answer session, Mashatile said the government supported smallholder farmers in rural areas through the agriculture agro-processing master plan.

“The master plan aims to enhance agricultural products, promote agro-processing, and enhance market access by creating capacity, accelerating land reform, and offering financial assistance to farmers,” he said.

He was responding to ANC chief whip Mdumiseni Ntuli, who observed that the smallholder farming sector is still unable to access credit from commercial banks due to the rigid qualification criteria of the banks, which have the effect of being discriminatory and exclusionary.

Ntuli asked about the government’s measures to accelerate agricultural support, implemented, and considered to assess the extent to which commercial banks can contribute towards growing the agricultural sector by adjusting their qualification criteria to smallholder farmers in rural and underdeveloped provinces.

Mashatile said the government was implementing support instruments to allow qualified potential producers to participate in the agricultural sector.

“These instruments are provided to eligible producers in the form of grants, loans, or a mix of both. This includes the grant-based Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme and the loan and grant-based blended finance scheme.”

He stated that through the blended finance scheme, the Land Bank, the Development Bank of South Africa, and the Department of Agriculture offer blended finance where grants were combined with loans to provide a more manageable financial package for emerging farmers.

“These interventions are implemented to ensure optimal participation of smallholder farmers, particularly from rural areas, and other producers in the agricultural sector, regardless of their scale of production.”

Mashatile also said several strides have been made towards improving access to funding and resource support for small-scale and smallholder farmers in terms of production support and market access.

“We are also committed to leveraging trade agreements in agricultural products through the Africa Continental Free Trade Area to boost intra-Africa trade, eliminate trade barriers and promote regional value chains. If we effectively utilise regional structures like the Africa continental free trade area, our smallholder farmers will have a platform to access larger regional markets and potentially benefit from increased demand for their products.”

He said they were actively seeking to expand agricultural market access to countries like Japan, particularly for citrus fruits and avocados.

In a follow-up question, DA MP Willie Aucamp said most smallholder farmers still do not own the land they farm on, and they, therefore, cannot provide that land as security for the loans.

Aucamp asked about steps being taken to ensure that the title deeds of land were transferred from the State to the people who farm on it so that they can easily obtain loans for working capital.

In response, Mashatile said one of the programmes that they were busy with was to ensure that most of those who have land transferred to them should also get title deeds to those pieces of land.

“That programme is on the table as we speak.”

He also said that the Minister of Agriculture, John Steenhuisen, and the Minister of Land Reform, Mzwanele Nyhontso, are collaborating to ensure that the problem of smallholder farmers still without title deeds to their land was addressed.

“You may have noticed that the Minister of Land Reform has been going around releasing more land, but also dealing with this very issue of ensuring titles. There is a bit of a challenge in rural areas because we also have to engage with the chiefs and the traditional leaders, and so on. Sometimes in some areas, the traditional leaders will say no, they must hold the title for everybody, and there is tension there, but we are busy dealing with it.”

mayibongwe.maqhina@inl.co.za

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