Employment in the South African farming sector remains robust – and well above long-term average levels – despite pressure on the sector over the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
This is important, since recent headlines suggest that farmers might also be struggling to find workers, amid the fallout from the wave of anti-immigrant marches.
The Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the three months to July, released this week by Statistics South Africa, saw only a 2% drop in farm workers, quarter-on-quarter, to 944,000 people.
This might seem worrying, but this is broadly aligned with slowing seasonal farm activity and is actually up 4% compared to the same period last year. What’s more, it is far ahead of the average 799,000 jobs in the sector.
This 4% year-on-year increase in employment illustrates the bigger picture: that we are in a year of agricultural abundance in fruit, vegetables, and various field crops, all of which are pretty labour-intensive.
In large part, this is because of the ample horticulture and field crops supported by the favourable La Niña rains, amongst specific interventions by farmers.
The benign jobs picture suggests that rising concerns about likely labour shortages – stemming from the anti-immigration marches – may be overblown.
‘No-one’ to harvest
This week, news agency AFP reported that the exodus of as many as 160,000 foreigners had left South Africa’s farming economy strapped. “I see a lot of farm owners who are crying now,” said one Zimbabwean worker Aaron Majatamhe. “People have to harvest those naartjies but there is no-one.”
One sugar cane farmer in Kwazulu-Natal’s north coast bemoaned that he had lost 80% of his cane-cutting workforce, saying things have deteriorated “to the point where it is going to be difficult for the mills to stay open.”
Yet it may be that these are isolated cases of shortages, and the broader farming sector doesn’t face such a crunch. In surveys done by the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and Agriculture South Africa (Agri SA), the results suggested the problems are isolated in a few areas and industries, and not widespread.
The fact that farm jobs are just about holding their own is even more impressive when you consider that we struggled, and continue to struggle, with foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, and some cases of African swine fever in the pork industry.
The big problem here has been rolling out the vaccines fast enough to protect livestock from foot-and-mouth disease. There is a lot of work going on right now to do this and progress is definitely being made.
Still, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be risks going into 2027.
Not only will the full impact of the immigration exodus become clear, but higher input costs, fuel and fertiliser, because of the lingering Middle East war, along with an expected El Niño drought, could weigh on the sector.
Farmers are also battling rising electricity prices, which add particular strain to those in irrigation regions, which produce all of South Africa’s fruits and vegetables, or as much as 20% of our field crops.
Wandile Sihlobo is the Presidential Envoy on Agriculture and Land. He is also the chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, and a senior research fellow in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University.