Forms of agricultural support and the “culture of dependency and entitlement”
Michael Aliber
Agrekon, 2019, vol. 58, issue 2, 141-153
Abstract:
The paper is based on a study that sought to understand the nature of the interaction between small-scale farmers and government in the Eastern Cape from a variety of different perspectives. The study involved a sample survey of farmers, and in-depth interviews with farmers, extension officers and other government staff, and leaders of farmer associations. This particular paper explores two themes that emerged in the course of the larger study: first, what is popularly known in South Africa and elsewhere as the “culture of dependency and entitlement”, and second, the forms of support that government chooses to offer to small-scale farmers. The paper argues that government is stuck in a vicious cycle whereby it seeks to placate expectant small-scale farmers with material support, which it can most effectively do via problematic group projects; although generally ineffective, the practice has the effect of maintaining widespread demand for such support, even to the point that small-scale farmers form group projects for the sole purpose of attracting it. In seeking to compensate for the weaknesses of this approach, government has sought to introduce compensatory measures such as “strategic partnerships”, sometimes with the ironic consequence that small-scale farmers no longer play a role in farming in “their” agricultural projects. The paper concludes that the government in the Eastern Cape needs to return to the basics of effective extension support aimed at supporting individual farmers; to the extent material support is still needed, it should no longer be given away for free.
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03031853.2019.1575249 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ragrxx:v:58:y:2019:i:2:p:141-153
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ragr20
DOI: 10.1080/03031853.2019.1575249
Access Statistics for this article
Agrekon is currently edited by A. Jooste, National Agricultural Marketing Council
More articles in Agrekon from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().