Operational challenges faced by smallholder farmers: a case of Ethekwini Metropolitan in South Africa

Abstract

The study is aimed at establishing the impact of access to capital, access to markets, access to information and access to technology on competitiveness of smallholder farmers on the market in Ethekwini Metropolitan in South Africa. A questionnaire is used as a research instrument. A total of 100 participants was sampled from a population of 485 smallholder farmers in Ethekwini Metropolitan. From the sample, 21% were male and 79% were female. All respondents were all from the African race. The study reveales that access to funding, access to markets, access to information and access to technology not only influenced viability of the smallholder farmers in Ethekwini Metropolitan, but also that the smallholder farmers were not getting enough access to all four stated variables. Of the 100 farmers, 66% of the smallholder farmers had plots with less than 0.5 acres under cultivation. Another finding was that even though the farmers had basic tools to work with, they required funding to acquire irrigation, water storage facilities, transport and tractors. As far as passing information to farmers is concerned, the farmers mostly preferred extension visits.The study recommends that well equipped agricultural resource centres be established in all the agricultural hubs. It is also recommended that the government employs an asset based community development approach when funding smallholder farmers and that the smallholder farmers and other stakeholders be conscientized on the concept of sustainable farming.

Barriers Affecting Sustainable Agricultural Productivity of Smallholder Farmers in the Eastern Free State of South Africa

“…About 38% of the farmers have farm sizes between 0.51 and 1.0 ha, followed by 36% of farmers who have farm sizes between 0.25 and 0.51 ha; only 3% have farm sizes of greater than 2 ha per household. These findings correspond with previous studies which reported that most of the South African smallholder farmers own less than 2 ha of land [3,24,58]. These findings confirmed that most of the South African smallholder farming community, which is dominated by resource-poor black farmers and who are mainly farming on former homeland areas, own about 13% of the total agricultural land [47,49,55,58].…”

“…Binary logistic regression model with a dependent variable (adoption of SAPs) against demographic, socio-economic and farm characteristics as explanatory variables was used to analyze the factors influencing the adoption of SAPs. The major demographic, socio-economic and farm characteristics factors that influenced adoption of SAPs in this study area were hypothesized to be age, gender, education, occupation, off-farm income, on-farm income, ownership of farm equipment, ownership of livestock, access to hired labor, awareness of SAPs, access to land, access to credit and access to extension services based on literature [3,17,24,[32][33][34].…”

“…Despite past efforts made by agricultural researchers, extension services and government institutions, crop production in South African smallholder farms remains lower than the potential for the land [1][2][3]. The low yields obtained are attributed to prolonged droughts, longer dry spells, limited water and nutrient availability, degraded soils and inefficient farming practices [4][5][6].…”

“…Given the wide diversity of South African regions, understanding the barriers that influence or hinder adoption of SAPs across the country is essential in order to develop interventions to enhance the adoption process, as targeting those barriers can improve the adoption of SAPs, not only in the study area but also in other regions that face the same barriers. A few studies have been conducted to identify the barriers and major constraints limiting the adoption of the most promising SAPs across South Africa [3,17,24]. However, these studies have only focused on conservation agriculture as one of the SAPs.…”

Evaluating the Effect of Farmers’ Participation in Irrigation Management on Farm Productivity and Profitability in the Mubuku Irrigation Scheme, Uganda

“…Furthermore, the paucity of data limits the ability to draw generalized lessons about the impacts, while well-demonstrated benefits of PIM is of paramount importance to convince reluctant farmers to take additional roles [21]. This is particularly the case in smallholder schemes of developing countries, where farmers are poorly resourced and their access to relevant information is cumbersome [22][23][24]. However, more than 80% of farmers are smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa, so plugging the gap is crucial [25].…”