“If we are to succeed, farmers must have access to funding and markets. If they don’t have that, you won’t succeed,” he said at the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg.
“You can give land to as many farmers as you want but if you don’t have support programmes it will fail.”
Mantashe was speaking about food security and land reform.
He urged commercial farmers to help groom emerging farmers and help them regain the skills needed for farming, which they had lost during apartheid.
“We have a responsibility to make people with no homes realise there is a future in South Africa,” he said.
“Black South Africans were dispossessed of land. The dispossession resulted in them [being driven] out of their land but it also deskilled them.”
He said people lost their skills because they had not farmed for so long and had lost their relationship with the land.
“Commercial farmers must help reproduce the skill,” he said.
