Posted on 09/07/2002 1:41:36 AM PDT by backhoe
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Announcement from Managers of Adriana Stuijt's "journalism during apartheid "site |
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Reply http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v6/v6i1a1.htm
Soil fertility is the number-one natural resource in Africa; yet its depletion on peasant-smallholder farms -- of which 85% are farmed by increasingly impoverished African women -- has led to stagnant or decreasing per capita food production all over Africa during the last two decades, this study found. This survey notes that there are very few studies on the relationship between subsistence farming, soil depletion and the suppression of African women -- except in this special edition on http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v6/v6i1a1.htm – a University of Florida project called “Gender and Soil Fertility in Africa."
It describes in great detail how over the past thirty years, Africa's women peasant-farmers are seen to raise less and less subsistance crops -- and so dramatically depleting the continent's farm soil that huge numbers of African families are fleeing the countryside into towns to escape famine on the impoverished soil.This study believes that this dramatic collapse of African agriculture is caused mainly by the fact that women usually produce the subsistence food crops, while African men produce export and cash crops to Western consumers: (coffee, tea, tobacco, flowers, pharmaceutical crops...)
This African tribal tradition is having a dramatic negative effect on the entire continent's ability to go on feeding itself.
This study explains in intricate detail eactly why Africa's food production is growing so steadily worse -- also describing how these long-suffering armies of African women on their small rainfed subsistence farms still manage to produce 70-80% of the food supply and 46% of the agricultural labour -- and are growing increasingly poor because they do not hold title deed to the land, and thus cannot raise cash to improve their farms. This is called the "feminization of poverty".
Found was that African women's food-crop yields are generally very low -- certainly far too low when compared to the last three decades of the world's dramatic Green Revolution -- and considerably lower than the yields obtained by African male farmers.
"Alarming trend: declining food production"
The report was designed to demonstrate to African policy makers which methods would work to reverse the alarming trend of declining per capita food production and the feminization of poverty in Africa -- and how to reach women farmers with different household compositions.
It has now also been firmly established -- through this study especially -- that producing cash crops (and cash activities in general) in Africa, are considered part of the male domain.
African subsistence farmers: severely suppressed, increasingly impoverished females:
"Subsistence food crops, those not sold but consumed in the household, are usually considered part of the female domain. This means women food producers usually do not have access to money from the sale of cash crops in order to buy yield-increasing inputs.
- "African women ... are dependent on their husbands or sons to even buy them fertilizer.
"...(and for instance) in Malawi, wives of tobacco farmers claim that their husbands buy them a few dresses and keep the rest of the additional income from tobacco, irrespective of the amount of labor provided by the women. In Dowa, Malawi, an agricultural programme directed at women only reports that husbands decide if and how much credit (in bags of hybrid maize harvested by both men and women) is repaid to this program, because hybrid maize is still considered part of the male domain... http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/index.htmlAnd this is the African agricultural tradition which the ANC-regime now now is fast-tracked in South Africa in their so-called "land reform programme".
Chronic food shortages -- also South Africa's future?
Can these described chronic food shortages caused by the deliberate agricultural mismanagement in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa , now also start occurring in South Africa -- once all the rural communities have been brought under ANC control through the Communal Land Act, as is being visualised in their five-year plans?
It is an established fact that local food shortages are increasingly reported in former homelands such as the Transkei and the Ciskei -- and where it is reported through a myriad of newspaper articles and field studies by agricultural researchers that the vast majority of previously fertile crop-farm land lies fallow.A recent report in the Sunday Times, also posted on the Censorbugbear site, noted that the few remaining subsistence-crop producers in the Eastern Cape indeed are elderly females, a previous generation of women who complain that the younger generation shows little interest in cash-crop or subsistence farming. All these tribal societies in the Eastern Cape also seem to concentrate on only owning cattle, the "traditional wealth of African society". This is a disastrous single-crop policy, an extremely dangerous situation whenever the weather fails to cooperate.
- It was exactly in this Xhosa-dominated region that a massive famine resulted from a religiously-inspired movement which slaughtered all the livestock in the belief that God would feed them and that they would therefore no longer need their cattle.
Yet the ANC continues with this relentless campaign to convert all of South Africa's crop-producing commercial farmlands, now run by highly capable commercial farmers, into such ANC-controlled tenant subsistence farm lands under the control of local tribal chieftains -- and which will all resort under the so-called "Communal Property Association Act Nr. 28 of 1996".
Eventually, most of rural South Africa will be under the control of this act, which means that commercial land title registration will also be eliminated from South Africa, just like the rest of Africa.This is already being predicted (approvingly) in an important research paper -- co-authored by the two recently attacked top agricultural academics Michelle Cocks and Dr Isla Grundy. (see previous postings on Farm News from 8/2002 about the attack on these women on Sept. 3, 2002).
Their report is entitled the "Masekane project: Challenges Facing a Community Structure to Implement CBNRM in the Eastern Cape, South Africa".
These two researchers, while voicing criticism of the widespread official corruption in these rural communities they had investigate, clearly also supported the underlying ANC policy that none of the occupants and food-producers of this land would ever hold legal title to it as singular land owners -- land titles with which each peasant farmer could be financially empowered through commercial bank loans.LAND-TITLE REGISTRATION FOR EACH PEASANT SMALLHOLDER WOULD REMOVE ANC'S MALE-DOMINATED POWER BASE:
http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v5/v5i3a4.htm
- Such land-title registration would remove the controlling power of African male-dominated societies and would obviously be unacceptable to the male-dominated ANC-regime from the top right down to the tribal chief level.
- Instead, these two woman researchers describe the ANC's ongoing land collectivization process as "group ownership tenancy"-- a strange concept which effectively results in ANC-controlled land being handed out ("redistributed") to the control of chief-ruled tribal communities who will not hold any kind of legal land title registration to this land.
- In Europe, this system of controlling the agricultural population and keeping them working the land was called fiefdom. Later in the Soviet Union and China, it has been given the name "collectivization", the communal use of land - communism.
- It is extremely puzzling that the Agri-SA agricultural union - which represents the 45,000 or so remaining commercial agricultural land owners in South Africa -- is actually participating, cooperating and actively giving their support to this ongoing collectivization and eventual destruction of South Africa's relatively small amount of viable farm land.
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CIA -- The World Factbook -- Zimbabwe
First it was Rhodesia then SA now America paying the price of silence.
-A Capsule History of Southern Africa--
| Parallels between Apartheid SA & USA today | |||||||||||||||
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ZWNEWS.com - linking the world to Zimbabwe MPR Books - Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African ... Title: "Cry, the Beloved Country" - Topics: World/South Africa -South Africa - The sellout of a nation--
We have a "bump list" here of subjects and items "indexed" to various categories of interest. Over 300 of them. Want to know more about Home Schooling, vouchers, environmental issues? We have them. Second Amendment? Right there. All you have to do is follow the links. Virtually all articles are "sourced"-- there's a link back to the original, so you can judge for yourself the merits. You won't get that with the TV sound bites. The posters' opinions which follow are often more illuminating than the articles. There is a wealth of information- some of it unique- on this site for those with eyes to see. AfricaWatch:
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