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Publications (51)
Increasingly, African countries are explicitly adopting agroecology in their national agricultural frameworks as a holistic approach to transforming their agricultural and food systems to improve food security, wealth creation, poverty reduction and to meet the commitments of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the African...
The purpose of this research was to gain insight into the extent and state of agroecological understanding, practice and advocacy in South and Southern Africa. It aims to generate knowledge that will be useful to inform strategies and work at a global policy level as well as in Southern Africa, and to contribute to reflection and learning on agroec...
This research report is the second phase of the multi-stage TAFS project. The first phase provided an overview of actors, policies and discourses on agroecology in South Africa, at the national level. It provides a synthesis of the findings from sites of existing agroecological transitions that were investigated during the second phase. These sites...
This report is one of three site reports from South Africa for the second phase of the Transitions to Agroecological Food Systems (TAFS) research project. The report looks at the Matatiele and Umzimvubu local municipalities in Alfred Nzo District in the Eastern Cape. It describes dynamics in the local food system, identifies and describes initiativ...
This report is one of three site reports from South Africa for the second phase of the Transitions to Agroecological Food Systems (TAFS) research project. The report looks at the Inchanga area in eThekwini Metro in the KwaZulu-Natal. It describes dynamics in the local food system, identifies and describes initiatives towards agroecological transiti...
This report is one of three site reports from South Africa for the second phase of the Transitions to Agroecological Food Systems (TAFS) research project. The report looks at the Overberg District and Overstrand Local Municipality in the Western Cape. It describes dynamics in the local food system, identifies and describes initiatives towards agroe...
Farmer-led seed systems can and do make a critical contribution in responding to current global ecological and social threats through adaptation to climate change, enhancing agricultural biodiversity, strengthening food security and sovereignty, increasing dietary diversity, and recognising and honouring indigenous knowledge and the key roles of
wo...
This study was conducted under the auspices of the Transitions to Agroecological Food Systems (TAFS) project. Its main objective is to provide policy makers and stakeholders with convincing arguments about the importance and adapted ways of promoting agroecological transitions in order to address current and coming sustainability challenges. It pro...
This briefing paper highlights key issues relating to recognition and support for farmer seed systems in Africa and beyond. Farmers’ seed constitutes the majority of seed used and exchanged. Crops produced from this seed contribute substantially to food and nutrition security for billions of people. However, these seeds receive scant recognition, a...
As seed and food sovereignty movements grow, and there is increased need to strengthen smallholder farmers’ production capabilities, issues of farmers’ independent seed development, production and distribution have arisen as practical considerations. This ACB report contributes to this movement by considering:
• Definitions of quality in seed produ...
South Africa is a dry country with limited arable potential. Commercial agriculture is found in pockets on the central Highveld, and in smaller pockets in KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces. Ecosystems have contributed to shaping settlement and transport patterns, but so has politics, especially in the form of spatial segregation associated w...
Like most other low and middle-income countries, South Africa must address a rising burden of diet-related chronic disease in a situation of persistent food insecurity and undernutrition. Supply-side policy interventions are a critical component of action to address the double burden of malnutrition. However, the food supply is governed by a number...
This report considers input supply in South Africa's smallholder farmer support programmes.The stated objectives of government programmes are to provide support to 300,000 smallholder farmers, and to bring underutilised land on communal areas and on land reform farms into production.
R46 billion was allocated to provincial farmer support programmes...
In the face of the onslaught of corporate seed policies and laws across the African continent, it is imperative that seed and food sovereignty movements and organisations resist these encroachments. These laws, based as they are on the stringent International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) 1991, are hostile to farmer seed sy...
The study is a joint publication by African Centre for Biodiversity and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. It discusses the Green Innovation Centre (GIC) project of the German government, its approach and its impact in Zambia. The development concept behind the GIC is farming as a business, focusing on integrating smallholder farmers into commercial value ch...
This report considers the role of smallholder farmers in plant breeding activities in partnership with formal public sector breeders. It provides a brief background to plant breeding in general, looking at farmer historical roles; the rise of breeding as a specialised activity; an historical overview of plant breeding in Africa; trade-offs and limi...
Agrifood corporations are driving industrialization along the entire global value chain, from farm to plate. Their purchasing and sales policies promote a form of agriculture that revolves around productivity. The fight for market share is achieved at the expense of the weakest links in the chain: farmers, and workers. The price pressure exerted by...
This contribution maps the South African agro-food system with a focus on corporate ownership and power, inspired by value chain work applied to the food system as a a whole. Corporations tend to dominate some nodes, for example input supply, grain storage and handling, and feedlots. Other nodes have a corporate core but with a wide number of small...
The report shares findings of field research that was conducted in 4 sites in Manica, Sussundenga and Gondola districts of Manica province and focused on mapping farmer seed varieties in 2016. Sixty seven varieties of the 7 most popular crops - maize, millet and beans, followed by sesame, peanut, sorghum and tubers - were grown in the research site...
As with the rest of the region, small-scale farming households in Zambia have maize as their primary crop and produce mainly for household use with surpluses sold or exchanged locally. Government support is premised on the extension of Green Revolution technologies to these households, in particular hybrid maize and synthetic fertiliser. Support ta...
Joining Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi to the coast of Mozambique, the Beira Corridor plays a central role in the expansion of the Green Revolution project in Southern Africa. The multi-donor Beira Agricultural Growth Corridor (BAGC) initiative has been established as Mozambique’s entry point for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). T...
The dominant corporate structure of South Africa’s agro-food system has led many to suggest there is limited value in redistributing land as a scarce economic resource, or in providing support to black small-scale farmers when large agribusinesses are capable of meeting food needs. Agrarian reform (land reform plus black small-scale farmer support)...
The report indicates a well-coordinated effort by selected states especially the US and in the EU, philanthropic institutions like AGRA, multilateral institutions like the World Bank, donors and multinational corporations (MNCs) including Yara, Monsanto and Pioneer to construct a Green Revolution that aims to produce a layer of commercial surplus p...
This article is based on research conducted in early 2012 in the Cape Winelands municipality
in South Africa. It considers the gendered dynamics of employment in two wine export value
chains. In one of the chains, produce is packaged and branded in South Africa for export and
in the other, bulk wine is sold for packaging and branding in Europe. The...
This article is based on research conducted in early 2012 in the Cape Winelands municipality in South Africa. It considers the gendered dynamics of employment in two wine export value chains. In one of the chains, produce is packaged and branded in South Africa for export and in the other, bulk wine is sold for packaging and branding in Europe. The...
The African Centre for Biosafety (ACB) is a non-profi t organisation, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was established to protect Africa's biodiversity, traditional knowledge, food production systems, culture and diversity, from the threats posed by genetic engineering in food and agriculture. It has in addition to its work in the fi eld of...
This PhD thesis explores the role of land reform in the production of space and relations of power in rural South Africa after 1994, based on a case study of a cluster of restitution farms in Makhado municipality in Limpopo province in northern South Africa. It uses Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, which proposes that space is a...
This report considers the structure of the South African agro-food system, and looks at points of possible intervention that could not only open the system to greater involvement by those who have been marginalised or passively incorporated into that system, but that also offer potential pathways to structural change that could deepen diversity in...
The city-region is a relatively new concept for South Africa, although the model has been growing in other parts of the world for more than a decade. The concept cannot be separated from scalar restructuring in the context of neo-liberalizing globalization. This generates economic, social and governance contradictions which throw open new spaces fo...
The Centre for Civil Society publishes regular peer reviewed research reports in order to stimulate debate and reflection in civil society. Most of these research reports are work in progress and many are later published in books and journals. Much of the work published in these research reports has been undertaken by the Centre, with funding from...
This paper is about the impact of market liberalisation on South Africa's citrus export industry. It responds to the lack of critical research on this topic: debates on the impact of liberalisation in agriculture are dominated by neo-classical economic approaches, which have uncritically applauded the impact of the 'free market'. According to these...
Land reform has become integrated into the broader neo-liberal strategies adopted by the post-apartheid government. It is essentially only elites who will benefit, argues Stephen Greenberg, from current policies.
This paper looks at the restructuring of Eskom and the electricity sector, and traces the actual and potential effects of this process on the ability of low-income households to access electricity. The first section takes a brief look at the international context of restructuring.The second section gives an historical overview of electricity supply...
Research report written for the Centre for the Study for Violence and Reconciliation, 2004. Joy Dladla is a former researcher at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Samantha Hargreaves is a researcher specialising in land and development issues. Stephen Greenberg is an independent researcher working in the NGO sector. Lisa Vett...
Projects
Projects (6)
TAFS is a multi-country project coordinated by Cirad (the French agricultural research and international cooperation organisation) with five partnership research platforms in South East Asia, Africa and Latin America. The main objective of the project is to provide policy makers and stakeholders with convincing arguments about the importance and adapted ways of promoting agroecological transitions in order to address current and coming sustainability challenges.
