COMMERCIALISATION OF AGRICULTURE?

 Sir,

Poverty, above the 60 per cent mark, is the worst scourge to have hit our land since the inception of this nation.  I would dare suggest that the other woes are either direct and /or indirect second round effects of the poverty curse.

Accordingly, commercialising agriculture would be a welcome move given that about 80 per cent of our poor people, a majority of whom are women, are found in rural areas where the main economic activity is agriculture.

Through commercialising agriculture we would be able to economically liberate those heavily poverty-burdened masses as a policy stance to that effect would facilitate the generation of meaningful income for the farmers and further create employment for the landless. Indeed, this would go a long way towards healing our land of the poverty scourge.

But like every other business, an agriculture business demands that there be some inputs without which success would be out of reach. The most basic input necessary in agriculture is land. The land tenure system in Swaziland is such that no Swazi can own land on Swazi Nation Land.  Hence every Swazi in the rural areas lives and farms on borrowed land, which denies them land security. This implies that accessing credit by using land as collateral is virtually impossible.

The few who can find credit through other means would be taking a huge risk investing it on borrowed land. Such investment could, for instance take the form of earth dams’ construction and an irrigation network to minimise reliance on the common erratic rains.
Another institutional impediment of our system is the marginalisation of women who are the majority of people living in the rural areas. Even though they are the biggest contributors to rural farming they are much more marginalised when it comes to land rights.

Conclusion

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