About 1,000 women in the village of Muswodi Dipeni, in the northern province of Limpopo, earn a living by harvesting the furry, hard-shelled baobab fruit pods. The seeds and the chalky powder inside the pods have become a global health craze celebrated for their vitamin-packed properties and now used in everything from flavoured soda, ice cream and chocolate to gin and cosmetics.

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.

As Ben Cousins recently argued in Business Day, agriculture can be an important contributor to the creation of jobs in SA through a well-executed land reform programme. But then we need to do it right and learn from SA's history, which has a lot to offer.

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.

The battle to ensure equitable and sustainable access to fresh water supplies is in the hands of all water users.

South Africa's farmers compete in a global village and have to use the latest technology to ensure that decision-making is as effective as possible. Technology also has an important role to play in empowering small-scale farmers to make their businesses more viable. 

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 South African Breweries (SAB) sources nearly all of its raw materials – used in the brewing process – from local South African suppliers.

Smallholder farmers are the drivers of many economies in Africa even though their potential is often not brought forward.... Smallholder farmers are also defined as those farmers owning small-based plots of land on which they grow subsistence crops and one or two cash crops relying almost exclusively on family labour.

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)”.

While the Land Bank’s mandate is good in its current form, its funding model needs work if it is to provide adequate funding for black business in the agricultural sector, Land Bank strategy and communications executive manager Sydney Soundy said during a Black Business Council (BBC) roundtable discussion.

According to the recently launched “Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP) Baseline Agricultural Outlook 2019–2028”, SA’s agricultural sector needs to do more to support the targets of transformation, jobs, growth and land reform that have been set by the National Development Plan (NDP).