Food security and rural safety are inseparable

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Most South Africans understand that access to necessities like food has an important relationship to safety – poverty and desperation can and do drive people to commit crimes. As South Africa fights the battle against criminality, we have to address pervasive poverty in our society, often due to a lack of opportunities. 

But we don’t often think about the reverse phenomenon: how crime affects our ability to guarantee the country’s food security. If we don’t deal with rural safety, we face the prospect of a declining capacity to grow our food locally, with devastating consequences for consumers and for the economy.

The safety landscape is ugly no matter where you go. From the farms to townships to suburbs, in provinces across the country, South Africans don’t feel safe, and the statistics presented by our police service only vindicate our well-founded fears. The most recent crime statistics show a year-on-year increase in murder, attempted murder, and robbery with aggravating circumstances. 

At the same time, the South African Police Service (SAPS) appears to have shrinking resources to remedy the situation. Recent reports indicate that the country has 1 300 fewer detectives and 3 000 fewer police officers than it had four years ago. Yet, while the picture is grim all around, it has a particularly dangerous impact in rural communities.

South Africa’s rural communities are home to one of its best-performing sectors – agriculture. This sector is especially important as few other industries have the incentives to operate in these communities. Our rural areas frequently draw the short straw on service delivery and infrastructure investment, leading to most new investments being concentrated in urban centres. Despite this, agriculture is the lifeblood of rural economies. But more than that, it is foundational to the nation’s most basic need: food.

In addition to the danger to the lives and well-being of rural community members, the ever-present threat of violent crime in South Africa poses a substantial threat to the country’s food security.

A recent study from Stellenbosch University found that one in five South African farmers plans to leave the sector in the next 10 years. The push factors cited included financial constraints, uncertainty about land reform and rural safety concerns. This figure is especially concerning when we consider the consequences of farmers exiting on this scale. 

Producing less food in South Africa would mean greater dependence on food imports. If the supply disruptions as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have taught us anything, it is how easily we can lose access to vital supplies owing to factors beyond our control. Countries such as Egypt, which relies on government-subsidised wheat imports, are an example of what the future may hold for South Africa if we lose our ability to grow local.

Not inevitable

But this destiny is not inevitable for South Africa. In addition to policy decisions around land reform, there are concrete steps we can take on rural safety to avoid plunging the country into food insecurity.

For starters, we need to take seriously the necessity of implementing the Rural Safety Strategy crafted by the sector, government and other stakeholders. The strategy represents a playbook for the South African Police Service, which, if implemented, would go a long way to addressing the inadequacies in rural policing and, most importantly for food security, restoring the confidence of farming communities in the commitment of the government to keeping them safe and protecting their operations. 

Its interventions range from relatively simple ones, such as increasing police visibility, to more complex questions of resource allocation, crime intelligence capacity, and the creation of police task teams and rapid response units.

Bring back reservists

These changes cannot be implemented overnight, but we can start now. For one thing, we can rebuild the reservist programme. Reservists are community members who volunteer their services to assist the police. Their tasks can range from administrative duties to community patrolling. Over the past decade, the system has virtually collapsed. South Africa has gone from between 50 000 and 60 000 reservists in 2010 to just fewer than 9 000 in 2019, and fewer than 5 000 this year. 

But farming communities are invested in their own safety and, with high unemployment in rural areas, there is sufficient manpower to capacitate the reservist system and increase police visibility. Agri SA is of the opinion that there needs to be a specific category for rural reservists. This will allow for the recruitment of more reservists, utilisation of possible civilian resources when police resources are not available and ensuring a faster response when needed.  

What is needed to kick-start this is the recruitment of at least two reservists per farmer association, starting with the hot-spot areas. These are low-hanging fruit we should be prioritising, but it is only a start.

Equally important is a consideration of food security as a factor in the allocation of police resources. For example, this year, the president announced the recruitment of 12 000 new officers. Yet these new recruits were allocated to specialised units of the SAPS. These units perform essential functions and must be capacitated. 

Yet rural safety ought to have been a priority area if given what’s at stake for our nation’s food security. How this vital sector is factored into resource allocation decisions in the future must be a subject for engagement between the SAPS and the sector if efforts to drive the sector’s growth, such as the agriculture and agro-processing master plan, are to succeed.

In a country with heinous crimes and sporadic shocks like the unrest in July 2021, it is understandable that these occurrences frequently dominate discussions about safety and policing. But our focus on the headline-grabbers must not distract from the chronic, simmering scourge of rural criminality that threatens the future of farming in South Africa. If we don’t address this issue with greater urgency, we may realise too late the true cost of eroding our capacity to grow our food locally.

Kobus Visser is the director for rural safety and provincial affairs at Agri SA.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.