A Systematic Literature Enquiry of the South African Agricultural Marketing Environment Pre-1913 to the Present

Introduction And Background

Commencing in 1994 when the new democratic government seized political and to some extent economic power, an effort was made to reverse both the colonial and apartheid agricultural marketing environment in South Africa (Piesse, et al., 2005; Walker, 2017; Vink, 2012; Spierenburg, 2020). An enabling policy, the Marketing of Agricultural Products Act No 47 of 1996 was passed, not only to level the playing field but also to taint the scale more towards the small-scale and emerging black farming sector. In particular, the Act anchored on one of the four objectives, i.e., “increasing market access for all participants” ((sub-section 2(1) (a)). Needless to say, this sub-section sought to close the host of discriminatory colonial and apartheid legislation. Although the emphasis was placed on a deregulated marketing environment, some support for emerging black farming was unavoidable as witnessed by a number of related strategies such as the land reform programme, especially the promulgation of the Restitution of Land Rights Act No 22 of 1994.

While earlier support to black farmers was provided through the Farmer Support Programme (FSP) (Kirsten, 1994), and Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme (CASP) (Chabalala, 2008), more recently the Agricultural Industrial Fund was initiated under the state-supported Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) (Reuters Staff- online). As articulated by Kirsten (1994) the FSP was not only introduced in South Africa by the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) as one of the major agricultural development strategies to support black farmers who have been historically denied access to basic support services”, but also in response to the inefficient and costly large-scale project approach that had been adopted until then. Some outcomes of these strategies included the provision of farming information, on-and off-farm infrastructure, production inputs, marketing information, business plan development and enabling finance for acquiring production capital (Msibi et al., 2011). However, as noted by Aliber and Hall (2012) implementing some of the above-mentioned programmes met with little success especially due to high implementation costs and beneficiation to fewer black farmers. It was suggested at that time that resolving the challenge required what was referred to as making concise decisions regarding two paradigms, i.e., either ensuring achievement of “accumulation for the few’ or ‘accumulation from below’ (Aliber and Hall, 2012). The first involved adoption of a strategy that could benefit a few black large-scale commercial farmers, while the latter focussed on benefiting many sustainable black commercial smallholders. However as articulated recently by Mmusi (2020) the challenge seems to revolve around skills transfer to black farmers that could be resolved through the adoption of concerted inclusive efforts at transferring farming skills to black farmers by government, non-government organisations and private sector institutions. Thus, while the above programmes succeeded in providing basic support services, their long-term sustainability hinged on levelling the playing field and uniform application. It is however critical at the commencement of this chapter to contextualize the meaning of the term ‘marketing’ to avoid ambiguities towards exchanging goods and services, and thus to correctly follow discussions that are a focus of this chapter.