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Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press

President Mbeki said in his speech at the opening of Parliament that we are a nation at work to build a better life. At Agriculture and Land Affairs, we are doing just that.

We are tackling the historic imbalances in agriculture by a multi-faceted strategy; redesigning farmer support services, building capacity in marketing and supporting the development of marketing infrastructure, promoting and redirecting research and technology development and identifying opportunities for small-holder farmers to move into the industrial production of crops like hemp, olives, sugar beet, sisal, flax, dates and macadamia nuts.

A pressing challenge is to ensure that through tenure reform initiatives, we are able to provide our people with secure tenure [where they live], and to prevent arbitrary or unfair evictions. The restitution programme is constitutionally mandated and will need to be accelerated in the next few years, whilst ensuring stability in the rural areas. In terms of the redistribution programme the challenge is to ensure that it contributes to farmer settlement, poverty eradication and integrated rural development in South Africa. At the same time we will be looking at ways of speeding up the land reform process and supporting those farmers who have gained access to land, to become successful farmers. I have asked for reports on the status of these programmes and once I have made an assessment of the progress I will be able to comment further.

Rural development of agribusiness though the active support of agriculture-related SMMEs, is one of the priorities for my term of office, as is the opening up of trade opportunities for our farmers.

Rural development, the alleviation of poverty and the creation of jobs will be a cornerstone of our endeavours. The Village Banks in the North West Province will be replicated countywide at a cost of R50 million Rand, a substantial amount of which has been leveraged through the SA/US Binational Commission.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the President emphasised the importance of partnerships. We plan to promote partnerships by holding an Agricultural Summit on an annual basis, starting in October this year. We will also seek ways in which the commercial farming sector can be involved in partnership programmes with small-scale farmers and rural communities. In this way we will also continue to implement the LandCare Programme.

Some initiatives that were started during my tenure as Deputy Minister of Agriculture are now bearing fruition. One such is the Female Farmer of the Year that will be announced in August this year. I invite you to go and visit provincial winners like Mrs Philisile Mathabela from KwaZulu-Natal, Mrs Jean Davidson from Gauteng and Mrs Christine du Toit from the Northern Cape and see what women farmers are achieving.

We will strengthen our capacity to ensure food security as well as food safety, as we did in the case of the Dioxin-tainted Belgian chickens recently. The NDA, with the Department of Health, the SABS and the CSIR, is examining the feasibility of creating a Food Control Agency. The implications would be that all food-related inspection services will be taken out of government and operated on a self-sustaining cost recovery basis.

In aligning the activities of both these departments there are some cross cutting themes. We will therefore be working in the next five years to accelerate delivery in the following key areas.

* Implementing a Farmer Settlement Programme which focuses on the youth and women;
* Improving the availability of services to support a diverse set of farming systems;
* Implementing a strategy to support Agribusiness Development aimed at job creation, black economic development and expanding the income generating opportunities in agriculture by focusing on value adding and the exploitation of the opportunities presented by the diverse indigenous fauna;
* Accelerating Land Restitution;
* Restructuring of the Irrigation Schemes in the ex-homeland areas
* Promotion of sustainable agricultural production, by opening up opportunities for industrial crops production and where land is scarce, promoting the introduction of the concept of food gardens.

Most of these activities will be implemented in collaboration with other government institutions, the private sector and the agricultural producers themselves.

Ladies Gentlemen: you will find more details on our commitment to delivery in the short document accompanying this statement. I thank you.

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