Date: 10/10/2003
Source: North West Provincial Government
Title: Molefe: North West Female Farmer of the Year awards ceremony
SPEECH BY NORTH WEST PREMIER, DR POPO SIMON MOLEFE, ON THE OCCASION OF THE 2003 PROVINCIAL FEMALE FARMER OF THE YEAR AWARDS, Rustenburg, 10 October 2003
Director of Ceremonies,
MECs present this evening,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am deeply honoured to join you this evening for the North West Female Farmer of the year Awards Ceremony.
It feels me with great pleasure to be in the company of those women of our province who, on a daily basis and often unnoticed, are contributing towards turning the tide against poverty, hunger, malnutrition and disease. These women, some of who are not here with us this evening, are the pride of our province and country. Through their work, they feed the nation.
More importantly, they are making an immense contributing to the ongoing effort to bring about food security in our country. Theirs is indeed a contribution towards building a healthy, strong and prosperous nation. We salute these women of our province. And we dedicate this evening to their achievements.
This evening belongs to those women who have ventured into an area that, for many years, has been the exclusive domain of men. They have broken free from the shackles of small scale, survivalist production and claimed their rightful place in the agricultural main stream.
They have excelled and proved their mettle in a terrain where many have faltered. They have confounded sceptics and, once more, put a nail in the coffin of the fallacy that women do not belong in the mainstream of society. In short, they have debunked all myths about the role of women in our economy and society. They are rewriting history and we are proud of them. This evening is theirs.
Like the many generations of women who came before them, today's award winners are pioneers. Their hard work has kept alive the proud legacy of women pioneers such as Cecilia Makiwane, the first black professional nurse, Patricia Jobodwana, the youngest and first black woman to graduate from a South African university and Junko Tabei the first woman to reach the summit of the awesome Mount Everest.
The women we are honouring today have given practical meaning to the ideals that those brave women of our country such as Bertha Gxowa, Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph stood for. These are the ideals of equality and women empowerment.
Apart from acknowledging the successes of women in agriculture, the female farmer of the year competition, whose winners we are honouring today, are intended encourage small scale producers, many of whom are rural women, to take advantage of the vast opportunities available in the agricultural mainstream.
Through these awards, we hope to instil a new ethos in our female farmers, an ethos that allows them to think beyond survivalist production. We also hope to instil confidence among them so that they begin to see themselves as major players in the agricultural sector, along side their male counterparts.
These awards, therefore, are an attempt to broaden participation in our agricultural sector. They form an integral part of our effort to mobilise all our people, men and women, in the fight against poverty and underdevelopment.
As part of our strategy to broaden participation in the agricultural mainstream, we as government continue to pay serious attention to land reform. This we are doing in order to open new frontiers of opportunities for emerging farmers.
Through the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme, we made good progress in not only returning land back to our people but also in ensuring that resettled communities are able to sustain and develop themselves. We are succeeding in restoring the dignity of our people whose land was savagely taken away from them as a result of discriminatory policies of the past.
Our success in this regard is evident from statistics released by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, which show that, nationally, since 1996 over 781 000 hectares of land have been returned to our people in terms of the land restitution programme. In our province, over 68 000 hectares of land have been returned to its rightful owners. This process benefited over 10 000 household and over 58 000 individuals.
We also take pride in the fact that we succeeded in dealing with the backlogs in land claims. An impressive 98% of all land claims received by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights in the North West Province were settled by July this year, leaving only ten cases outstanding.
We are also seized in the strategic task of developing a strong agricultural cooperatives sector. This we are doing because we believe cooperatives can play a significant role in facilitating the entry of small-scale producers, which are a common feature of our province, into the agricultural mainstream.
Our drive to empower emerging farmers continues to gather momentum as a growing number of them now have access to agricultural finance. This is as a result of partnerships we have built with institutions such as the Land Bank.
We continue to focus on building capacity among emerging farmers. In the 2002/03 financial year, through the Provincial Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Environment, we have given technical support to emerging farmers resulting in the implementation of no less than 74 agricultural projects. The beneficiaries of these projects are women, the youth and the disabled.
We also count among the successes of our capacity building programme, the fact that we facilitated the registration of four agricultural cooperatives during the 2003/04 financial year. These cooperatives were also assisted to develop activity plans.
Programme Director, we are engaged in all these initiative because we are committed to the objective of improving the quality of life of our people. However, we are aware that in order to achieve this objective we will need to work together with all South Africans.
It is for this reason that I wish to urge our farming community, particularly white farmers, to extend a hand of friendship and brotherhood to their emerging counterparts. Specifically, I urge them to support the current land reform process. Let us isolate and condemn all those who choose to obstruct this process.
I wish to reassure white farmers that our land reform policies have always sought to build and not to destroy, to unite and not to divide. We have opted for predictability over uncertainty and justice over injustice. More importantly, our land reform policies form part of efforts to heal the wounds of our unhappy past. They seek to place our country firmly on a road to lasting reconciliation.
Once more, I wish to congratulate this evening's award winners. We are indeed proud of you. Those who won't be receiving awards should know that they too are our heroes, their efforts have not gone unnoticed.
I thank you!!!
Issued by: Office of the Premier, North West Provincial Government
10 October 2003
Source: North West Provincial Government
Title: Molefe: North West Female Farmer of the Year awards ceremony
SPEECH BY NORTH WEST PREMIER, DR POPO SIMON MOLEFE, ON THE OCCASION OF THE 2003 PROVINCIAL FEMALE FARMER OF THE YEAR AWARDS, Rustenburg, 10 October 2003
Director of Ceremonies,
MECs present this evening,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am deeply honoured to join you this evening for the North West Female Farmer of the year Awards Ceremony.
It feels me with great pleasure to be in the company of those women of our province who, on a daily basis and often unnoticed, are contributing towards turning the tide against poverty, hunger, malnutrition and disease. These women, some of who are not here with us this evening, are the pride of our province and country. Through their work, they feed the nation.
More importantly, they are making an immense contributing to the ongoing effort to bring about food security in our country. Theirs is indeed a contribution towards building a healthy, strong and prosperous nation. We salute these women of our province. And we dedicate this evening to their achievements.
This evening belongs to those women who have ventured into an area that, for many years, has been the exclusive domain of men. They have broken free from the shackles of small scale, survivalist production and claimed their rightful place in the agricultural main stream.
They have excelled and proved their mettle in a terrain where many have faltered. They have confounded sceptics and, once more, put a nail in the coffin of the fallacy that women do not belong in the mainstream of society. In short, they have debunked all myths about the role of women in our economy and society. They are rewriting history and we are proud of them. This evening is theirs.
Like the many generations of women who came before them, today's award winners are pioneers. Their hard work has kept alive the proud legacy of women pioneers such as Cecilia Makiwane, the first black professional nurse, Patricia Jobodwana, the youngest and first black woman to graduate from a South African university and Junko Tabei the first woman to reach the summit of the awesome Mount Everest.
The women we are honouring today have given practical meaning to the ideals that those brave women of our country such as Bertha Gxowa, Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph stood for. These are the ideals of equality and women empowerment.
Apart from acknowledging the successes of women in agriculture, the female farmer of the year competition, whose winners we are honouring today, are intended encourage small scale producers, many of whom are rural women, to take advantage of the vast opportunities available in the agricultural mainstream.
Through these awards, we hope to instil a new ethos in our female farmers, an ethos that allows them to think beyond survivalist production. We also hope to instil confidence among them so that they begin to see themselves as major players in the agricultural sector, along side their male counterparts.
These awards, therefore, are an attempt to broaden participation in our agricultural sector. They form an integral part of our effort to mobilise all our people, men and women, in the fight against poverty and underdevelopment.
As part of our strategy to broaden participation in the agricultural mainstream, we as government continue to pay serious attention to land reform. This we are doing in order to open new frontiers of opportunities for emerging farmers.
Through the Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) programme, we made good progress in not only returning land back to our people but also in ensuring that resettled communities are able to sustain and develop themselves. We are succeeding in restoring the dignity of our people whose land was savagely taken away from them as a result of discriminatory policies of the past.
Our success in this regard is evident from statistics released by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights, which show that, nationally, since 1996 over 781 000 hectares of land have been returned to our people in terms of the land restitution programme. In our province, over 68 000 hectares of land have been returned to its rightful owners. This process benefited over 10 000 household and over 58 000 individuals.
We also take pride in the fact that we succeeded in dealing with the backlogs in land claims. An impressive 98% of all land claims received by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights in the North West Province were settled by July this year, leaving only ten cases outstanding.
We are also seized in the strategic task of developing a strong agricultural cooperatives sector. This we are doing because we believe cooperatives can play a significant role in facilitating the entry of small-scale producers, which are a common feature of our province, into the agricultural mainstream.
Our drive to empower emerging farmers continues to gather momentum as a growing number of them now have access to agricultural finance. This is as a result of partnerships we have built with institutions such as the Land Bank.
We continue to focus on building capacity among emerging farmers. In the 2002/03 financial year, through the Provincial Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Environment, we have given technical support to emerging farmers resulting in the implementation of no less than 74 agricultural projects. The beneficiaries of these projects are women, the youth and the disabled.
We also count among the successes of our capacity building programme, the fact that we facilitated the registration of four agricultural cooperatives during the 2003/04 financial year. These cooperatives were also assisted to develop activity plans.
Programme Director, we are engaged in all these initiative because we are committed to the objective of improving the quality of life of our people. However, we are aware that in order to achieve this objective we will need to work together with all South Africans.
It is for this reason that I wish to urge our farming community, particularly white farmers, to extend a hand of friendship and brotherhood to their emerging counterparts. Specifically, I urge them to support the current land reform process. Let us isolate and condemn all those who choose to obstruct this process.
I wish to reassure white farmers that our land reform policies have always sought to build and not to destroy, to unite and not to divide. We have opted for predictability over uncertainty and justice over injustice. More importantly, our land reform policies form part of efforts to heal the wounds of our unhappy past. They seek to place our country firmly on a road to lasting reconciliation.
Once more, I wish to congratulate this evening's award winners. We are indeed proud of you. Those who won't be receiving awards should know that they too are our heroes, their efforts have not gone unnoticed.
I thank you!!!
Issued by: Office of the Premier, North West Provincial Government
10 October 2003
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