Space, markets and employment in agricultural development: South Africa

Abstract

Growth in the agricultural sector has long been assumed to automatically benefit the rural non-farm sector, mainly through production or consumption ‘linkages’, including expenditure by farmers and their workers. However the economic and employment benefits of agriculture depend crucially on the spatial patterns of agricultural production, processing and marketing (and their linkages to local markets). These policy findings draw on detailed area-based research examining agriculture, along with its upstream and downstream ‘linkages’, in the Weenen district of KwaZulu-Natal (Neves & Hakizimana, 2015). The district is home to both large and small-scale commercial farmers primarily engaging in horticulture. The research examined the economic and employment contribution of agriculture, and its impact on the larger RNFE.