Amid looming food prices, climate change - South Africa allows farms to fade, farmers to be murdered, while population grows unabated

Andre Jooste, a senior manager at the National Agricultural Marketing Council, said they had seen a “relatively big increase” in the demand for food in the country. “The main concern with national food security is the fact that, since the early ’90s, the population has grown by 32% while overall agricultural production has only grown by 10%,” Jooste said.

“The issue is that at least 50% of land reform projects have failed, and that means for many of the people involved their circumstances have not improved — and for some, have even got worse. And all this is happening in the midst of a rise in food prices." - Ann Bernstein said.

clipped from www.thetimes.co.za SA becomes net importer of food as vast tracts of land lie fallow. Thousands of once-productive farms, mainly in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the Eastern Cape, lie abandoned and are causing serious shortages of staple foods. On a two-week visit to farms around the country, the Sunday Times discovered that: Twenty top crop and dairy farms in the Eastern Cape, bought for R11.6-million and returned to a Kokstad community, are now informal settlements; A once-thriving potato farm in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands is now a makeshift soccer field; Ten thousand people given back 8000ha of prime fruit and macadamia farms in Limpopo are crippled by R5-million debt; A former multimillion-rand tea estate in Magoebaskloof in Limpopo has become an overgrown forest; More than five tons of a macadamia nut crop on a reclaimed Limpopo farm was so poor that it was dumped into the Levubu river; and