Steenhuisen endorses racial targets for agriculture

The agricultural department has succeeded in riling up the farming community again, by making a strong public statement in support of “transformation” (the process of coercively removing white people from various institutions and economic sectors) in the Agricultural and Agri-processing Master Plan (AAMP).

A recent statement on agrinews.net, shared by Theo de Jager of SAAI, the biggest representative of farmers in the Southern African region, on X yesterday, criticised Steenhuisen for his endorsement of a policy process which has shut out all critical voices, particularly from small and medium farming enterprises and minority rights advocates.

Mega-farmer lobby groups like AGBIZ and AgriSA, who represent the interests of massive corporation with BEE share status and close ties to the ruling party, who generally endorse anything the state does by default, have given strong support, but SAAI, who represent individual farmers, often small and family-owned, have consistently been sidelined, including having their CEO Theo de Jager photoshopped out of press photos after criticising government policy, have objected to the race-based policies.

de Jager’s comment on the matter was succinct: “Transformasie kan nooit belangriker as winsgewendheid en volhoubaarheid op plase wees nie. SAAI daag AGBIZ en alle ondertekenaars van die AAMP wat beweer dat hulle namens boere praat, uit om hierdie stelling in die openbaar te ontken.”

In 2022 when the AAMP was adopted, Theo de Jager responded to its fictitious claim of broad consultation: “[Dept. of Agriculture] Performance information as filed in parliament makes for some curious reading! They are on a different planet! It starts with “The AAMP (masterplan) has been endorsed by all social partners and stakeholders” so I knew the rest of the 92 pages would also be fiction”

John Steenhuisen and the rest of the DA have long supported racial transformation, though find themselves in the tricky position of having to pretend they don’t in order to placate the minorities who support them electorally. Their key policy aims for the past couple of decades have been to push DEI programmes under the UN Sustainable Development Goals which they have made the cornerstone of their manifesto, and to implement the ANC’s National Development Plan, which party mandarin Helen Zille has endorsed since at least 2012, when she voiced her long-term intention of merging with the ANC, even under Jacob Zuma.

On the 7th of October in the Agricultural Agriculture Portfolio Audit Outcomes meeting discussing the Annual Reports, Steenhuisen said that transformation is a core policy for “inclusive growth”. SAAI, TLU SA, and other representatives of the agricultural community have objected that their nine formal objections (from three meetings) have been consistently ignored, particularly objecting to the central planning and racial quotas, but also to the fact that unions and major industry cartels were invited to participate, but most farmers have been sidelined.

Steenhuisen state d that he advocates for “constructive dialogue”, but that media statements “hinder progress”. This is a strong indicator that the DA favour yes-men, and object to criticism, which is nothing new.

Racial transformation will be facilitated by “blended finance” from the AgriBEE Fund, statutory levies and Agricultural Trusts, allowing major market players to profit from loans to emerging farmers while their risk is mitigated by additional taxes extracted from existing enterprises. The implementation of these loans will by controlled by the department. The state will be sending commissars, called ” state extension officers”, to micromanage agricultural business, ostensibly to aid new farmers, but also to supervise transformation policy, as well as proposing “secondment” of industry officers to government departments, to ensure that megafarms benefit from implementation.

The AgriBEE funding framework itself excludes educated farmers from benefit, exclusively focusing on increasing ownership of military veterans, the unemployed and agricultural workers of farming enterprises, but also only allows registered corporations in business for three years to participate. They loan only for acquiring business equity and value-added processing development, and do not assist small farmers with loans for the primary issue blocking them from starting their businesses, namely primary agricultural equipment and seedstock, clearly benefitting established large businesses. Shareholding is financed only up to 49% ownership, and does not allow participants to purchase farming businesses outright.

Land use targets include trying to bring one million hectares of “underutilized” or fallow land (primarily in communal and reform areas) into commercial production by 2030. This targets land reform beneficiaries and black farmers to boost output and address land access inequities. The plan also designates specific regions as commodity corridors (e.g., citrus in Eastern Cape, grains in Free State) to optimize land use. These corridors aim to align land allocation with high-potential crops and livestock, with transformation as a core criterion. Land reform programs (e.g., Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy) are linked to AAMP to ensure redistributed land is “productively” used, with a focus on black farmers’ access to arable land.

In other words, racial transformation is being used as an implement of central economic planning.

Those private-sector representatives who are invited to participate were pre-selected in the 2022 document, naming the main lobby groups from the infrastructure and agricultural sectors, implying a premeditated exclusion of other representatives of small and medium-sized enterprises, instead opting for a corporatist approach of harmonising unionised labour with quasi-monopolistic enterprise and ruling-party interests.

Students of economic history will recognise this approach as being similar to the economic policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, who sought to discipline and reward unions and corporations for their allegiance to the ruling party, who were given shares in these corporations and places in union structures through coercive and corrupt means.