PEDRO MZILENI | SA needs colleges to develop its agricultural economy fully

The UN predicts that by 2050, the population of Africa will increase by 25% and the highest concentration of that rise will be in Southern Africa.

This because the continent is overwhelmingly young and female with increased life expectancy as a result of our improved healthcare systems in the past three decades.

The UN adds that these population increases will mainly be urban and most will congregate in cities – and they are going to be in dire need of thriving economies in order to get jobs, housing, food and sustainable communities.

If this kind of an economy is not delivered, these population increases will breed political conflicts, wars, crimes and a total destruction of our humanity altogether.

Most importantly, these population numbers will need food to eat, land  in which to produce and reside, and prosperous democracies to have a higher quality of life.

As things stand, especially in SA, we don’t have the right social ingredients in place to address this looming catastrophe.

Population increases can be opportunities, depending on how best a country plans ahead and begins to lay a solid socio-economic foundation to take advantage of its strength in human capital.

China did not look at its 1.4-billion population as a burden. Instead, it saw its people as an asset to drive industrialisation for the purpose of running the world economy. We need a leadership that will think in this manner and begin to create basic partnerships that will unlock our key areas of development in order to grow productive assets and economies that will cover everyone.

For instance, we need to start with building agricultural colleges that will:

•  produce a new class of food producers and entrepreneurs who will take advantage of our underutilised land to transform the agricultural sector and its ownership patterns, generate wealth for commercial trade and economic transformation, and safeguard food security for all;
•  utilise agricultural produce as a solid foundation to build other value chain industries such as infrastructure development, rural development, and a rapid response to fix our railway networks, reopen our logistical economies, and the application of economic pressure to secure the required energy solutions we need to drive all these projects concurrently;
•  revive our rural communities to become new spaces of capital production to give material meaning and longevity to the land reform and land expropriation agenda.

These three focus areas require agricultural colleges that will provide the necessary public education to conscientise the youth and communities about the potential value of farming.

These colleges need to be equipped with massive funding to afford equipment for practical training and they will require industry-relevant curricula and partnerships with both small scale farmers and commercial food producers in order to afford students high quality training and immediate opportunities.

They need to be attached to the rest of the role players in the farming value chain – such as domestic and international trade, packaging and logistics, medicine, advertising, insurance, tourism, processing, banking and the hospitality industry.

The colleges must partner with community colleges, traditional universities that have agricultural faculties and departments, ordinary communities and developers – and they must have democratic admission policies that admit as many people as possible who have passion for this industry no matter their ages and backgrounds.

This option will stretch the essence of receiving agricultural education away from the technical regulations of traditional higher education systems and begin to provide training opportunities to a larger group of the unemployed mass of the population that can obtain a skill for self-reliance and self-sustenance.

In other words, when SA begins to base its future economies and possible technological transformations on agricultural education, it will have a better chance of addressing its socioeconomic challenges at a better rate.

An agricultural economy built on an intellectual structure that these agricultural colleges will provide can open further opportunities to industrialise our economy, create a new class of productive black entrepreneurs, ensure food security and reduce our vulnerability to global markets, give tangible meaning and long-term value to our land expropriation programme to safeguard our sovereignty and, most importantly, ensure that we are able to independently feed ourselves and our children in 2050 in a thriving African economy.