Its strong up- and downstream employment and economic multipliers suggest that agriculture could be the engine for inclusive growth in South Africa.

Tracy Davids leads Commodity Markets and Foresights Research and is a director at the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP). Ferdi Meyer is the managing director and leads Value Chain Analytics at BFAP. He is also an Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University.

A decade has passed since the National Development Plan (NDP) was published. It identified agriculture as the main sector to drive development opportunities in South Africa’s rural areas. Agriculture has strong linkages to upstream and downstream industries and thus expansion at the primary level will spill over into the wider development of rural economies. Besides the opportunities for inclusive expansion in farming in areas that are currently underutilised, agriculture is typically the biggest employer of labour in rural areas, and capital invested on farms is often a precursor of further investment in newly developed industries that follow such development.

The strong up-and-downstream employment and economic multipliers suggest that agriculture could be the engine for inclusive growth in South Africa. The agriculture sector is currently in another planning phase with the drafting of the Agriculture and…