When it comes to global food security and the development of smallholder farmers, we live in an era of lessons learned. Never before have we understood as much about what does work and what does not.

The dwindling agrarian and small farming communities around the world have certainly not had it easy during the last 50 years or so.

The current heated debate on land reform is fuelled by bold pronouncements about how white-owned land should be secured for African people.

South Africa’s agricultural sector is unique in such a way that it favours industrial farming, unlike in many countries on the continent.

Driven by population growth and growing land scarcity, most African farm households are witnessing the gradual sub-division of their land. Over time farms are getting smaller and smaller.

If 2018 was the year of the global heatwave, then 2019 looks set to bring even more extreme weather with early indications of an El Niño event in the next three months.

Li Tie, a Chinese businessman who has been trading Chinese manufactured agricultural machinery in Africa for almost 20 years, always sees his Indian counterparts as strong competitors in local market.

We often hear that irrigation in Africa is too limited, and that the key to a “green revolution” on the continent is to expand to levels seen in Asia.

African farming must modernise and replace its ageing workforce if the continent is going to be able to feed its rising population, a report by leading economists has warned.

Humans and satellites have a hard time beating a drone’s eye for detail in scanning farming systems from above. Flying below the clouds, collecting and sending images in almost real-time, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) gained ground quickly in agriculture in the last decade as part of so-called precision agriculture.

The agricultural sector is of key strategic importance in unlocking the inclusive and sustainable economic growth and development goals of Durban and the province as a whole.

Colonialism brought large-scale farming to Africa, promising modernisation and jobs – but often dispossessing people and exploiting workers. Now, after several decades of independence, and with investor interest growing, African governments are once again promoting large plantations and estates. But the new corporate interest in African agriculture has been criticised as a “land grab(link is external)”.

Smallholder farming has been neglected over the past 25 years of South Africa’s attempt to redistribute land taken away from black people during the apartheid era.

The proportion of smallholder farms globally may be much larger than previously thought, suggesting that their current contribution to global food production could be underestimated, a crowdsourcing study reveals.

A great deal of research on agriculture in Africa is organised around the premise that intensification can take smallholder farmers out of poverty. The emphasis in programming often focuses on technologies that increase farm productivity and management practices that go along with them.

In West Africa, agricultural production tends to fluctuate.

The minister of agriculture, land reform and rural development, Thoko Didiza, today announced funding allocations to mitigate food security in the country through a R1.2 billion cash injection for small-scale farmers.

The world is at a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the smallholder farmers who feed millions of Africans are not given much attention and support.