Economic growth and employment.
Despite structural power imbalances around the globe, quick fixes improved the well-being of most vulnerable people, both in low to medium-income countries (LMICs) and High-Income Countries (HICs), and proved that a transformation towards a fairer socio-economic development was possible.
According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, 2022, there are four key triggers for the transformation of agri-food systems: improved governance; increased consumer awareness; better income and wealth distribution; widespread technological, social, and institutional innovations.
With labour-saving AI innovations based on digitalisation, the problem of excess labour supply emerged.
This is also experienced in South Africa as elsewhere in the world. Telkom is shedding a further 1 500 jobs, and Post Office 6,000 jobs, Tongaat Hulett 5 000 jobs, Multi Choice 2 000 jobs, Sibanje-Stilwater 3,000 jobs, Absa over 800 jobs, Standard Bank 1200 jobs, and the list goes on.
Universal basic income programmes in selected countries smoothed the social impacts of job losses resulting from automation, and a few new “green jobs” emerged. However, capital and information intensification of production processes further concentrated capital ownership.
“Capital deepening”.
The long-run historical pattern has been the substitution of labour and animal traction with machines, a process known as “capital deepening”.8 This process leads to a steadily rising capital-labour ratio.
Commentators have coined the phrase “Agri-food 4.0”, where automation and digitalisation stand poised to radically transform the sector and the daily lives of those who participate in it. Just ten firms, by 2011, represented 75 percent of the seed market.
By 2013, six corporations accounted for 75 percent of the global agrochemical market, 63 percent of the commercial seed market, and more than 75 percent of all private-sector research. In 2020, the four top agrochemical firms (ChemChina/Syngenta, Bayer, Corteva and BASF) weighed 65 percent of the market.
The spectacular growth of international trade in agricultural commodities has led to new forms of organisation.
Global value chains structure the world food economy and have become major suppliers of food and agricultural products around the planet, governed by powerful lead firms that define private production and processing standards to meet consumers’ requirements.
Daily, South Africans are bombarded with rhetoric relating to transformation, with words accompanying it such as inclusive, sustainable, fair, and broad-based beneficiation.
However, mechanisation and digitalisation, capital, and information intensity of production is increasing in all sectors, including food and agriculture. While this process contributes to raising overall productivity, it also raises concerns about the level of employment, both in rural and urban areas.
It is a fact that increasing capital intensity in the downstream segments of food value chains limits labour demand in processing and distribution. There is a significant concentration on agricultural inputs.
The increasingly drastic standards applied in global value chains raise barriers to entry and are responsible for making them more exclusive, particularly where governments scale back their support to smallholders and firms streamline operations to enhance competitiveness.
Large food manufacturers and supermarkets (Shoprite Checkers is a perfect example of this practice - it may be understandable from their point of view) often seek to work directly with a small number of preferred, mostly big, suppliers capable of meeting their stringent requirements. This excludes and marginalises smallholders unable to comply with standards or are producing too little to justify dealing with.
The consequence of this evolution has been to exclude and marginalise tens of millions of smallholders unable to comply with standards or who produce too little for large corporations to consider dealing with them.
If past trends continue, there will be further concentration in food systems, and more smallholders are often excluded and pushed towards urban areas throughout the world, particularly in LMICs.
The major trends in the world food system may not look promising for the rural villages and the people trying to make a living there.
But there are possibilities to improve their livelihoods. Current trends in Aquatic food systems, both oceanic and inland, show continued growth in size and value. It demonstrates the increasing contribution of fisheries and aquaculture to food security and livelihoods.
Global fisheries production has multiplied almost twelve times over the last seven decades to reach 213 million tonnes in 2019. By 1995, when the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries was endorsed, capture production entered a phase of stabilisation with slow long-term growth, illustrating improvements in management and data collection as well as expansion towards new or under-exploited stocks ( see Figure 1.78 below).
Conversely, from 1995 to 2019, aquaculture production increased by 250 percent. While this growth rate has slowed in the past few years, aquaculture continues to be the fastest-growing, food-producing sector worldwide.
Tilapia World market size is estimated to reach $5,851 million by 2026.
Tilapias are suited to low-technology farming systems because of their fast growth rate, hardiness, efficient converters of supplementary feeds, resistance to disease, ease of reproduction, and tolerance to wide ranges of environmental conditions.
The demand for jobs, food security and productive use of land and water will be major drivers of the tilapia sector’s growth. The water usage for cattle breeding is anything between 30 and 50 litres per day. In contrast, Tilapia fishing requires much less water, and wastewater is re-usable. According to David Fincham, he has created an Aquaculture Production Unit (APU), which is a ready to farm aquaculture system designed around Recirculating Aquaculture System principles.
It offers a unique and straightforward way for anyone to enter the world of fish farming with the lowest cost of entry, lowest running costs and lowest technical requirements.
The APU is a complete and ready-to-install system.
David’s company has already supplied 450 APUs to farmers in Africa, of which one hundred are in South Africa. Small-scale farming is vital to South Africa and Africa’s food security, and fish farming can yield good returns even on a small piece of land and is a solution to our rural development challenges.
The income generated from fish production can diversify and develop other farming activities, making farmers more resilient against external, uncontrollable elements such as the economy, markets, the weather, and disease outbreaks.
South Africa now needs a strong drive to create an alliance of consumers and producers able to take the lead in piloting the food systems through a transition towards greater sustainability by insisting on consumption and local production.
Corrie Kruger is an Independent Analyst.
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