WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-10-30 Time: 17:00:11 Posted By: Jan
Isn’t it ironic how so many politicians and commentators who regularly criticised the Mbeki government for not looking after the poor are now warning against policy adjustments by the new ANC leadership aimed exactly at achieving that?
It is amazing how the testosterone-charged capitalists in South Africa have been caught with their pants down, but they’re still not noticing it. Elsewhere in the world, the macho money-men are all having a rethink about controls over the financial institutions and indeed the market itself, but here we’re still shouting “Communist!” when someone even whispers the phrase “state intervention”.
As Trevor Manuel said last week, the impact of the spectacular crash of the international markets will be seen as similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall (or 9/11, some say) – our lives will not be the same afterwards; our thinking shouldn’t be either. The most serious economists are dusting off their John Maynard Keynes volumes; the really clever ones have quietly taken their long-hidden copies of Das Kapital off the shelf.
I’m not suggesting that we ask the men and women of the SA Communist Party to formulate our new economic policies. They have thoroughly discredited themselves with their Stalinist approaches and intolerance of difference of opinion in the tripartite alliance, and their leadership is dominated by anti-intellectual bullies and cheap populists.
But I am saying the time for a new brand of economics and politics has arrived. It will have to be a home-grown mix of social democracy and a developmental state that will not scare off foreign and local investors, won’t compromise economic growth, but will have a much sharper focus on social stability and justice than we’ve had before.
My thoughts on these matters and the reminder that we need to really start thinking “out of the box”, as the cliche goes, were not provoked by the ANC, Cosatu and the SACP’s recent economic summit.
I was travelling in the former Yugoslavian states during a month-long trip to the Balkans when it struck me that their almost-socialist agricultural system serves them far better than our capitalist system serves us.
I have long been of the view that we need to encourage commercial farmers and agri-business to go big, to produce food on a mass scale, and only then should we tolerate small and subsistence farmers. Peasant farmers, I believed and preached, are only good as a transitional system, because they actually waste the land and only produce food for their families.
However, I was wrong. Very wrong. It was a humbling lesson to me not to have any strong views on a topic until you’ve really investigated and considered all sides of the argument.
Travelling through Serbia I was intrigued by the endless hectares of maize visible from the road – intrigued, because I grew up in the “Mielie Driehoek” in the Free State where everything was about maize. Serbia, I was informed when I started enquiring, is one of the world’s top three maize producers.
But then I noticed that I never saw a single combined harvester (October is harvest time in the north). I only saw men, women and teenagers harvesting the maize by hand, then transporting the harvest with strange little two-wheeled, two-stroke tractors hooked onto small carts. Thousands of them.
I was later told that there are something like 261 000 of these simple, single-axled tractors in use in Serbia and that they cost the equivalent of about R3 000 each.
The two-wheeled contraption can also be used in front of a simple plough or a planter with a guiding wheel.
It is mainly this odd vehicle that makes it possible for small farmers to produce more maize (and wheat, sugar beet, sunflowers and potatoes) than they need.
The majority of farmers in Serbia operate on very small pieces of land, most of them owned by the family and handed down through generations. Even large commercial farms are much smaller than our maize farms … averaging about 500ha.
The small farmers don’t live lives of luxury, I was told, but they don’t starve, they can afford enough wholesome food, good clothes, education for their children and many even buy a vehicle after saving for a few good years.
The secret, apart from cheap technology, is the network of agrarian organisations – farmers’ co-operatives, unions and funds – that give the small farmer more clout and access when it comes to buying seed and equipment or marketing and selling produce.
It’s a classic socialist solution with a twist – farmers own their land and can sell their produce on the open market.
I would really advise our politicians and civil servants concerned with land reform and agriculture to visit Serbia to see if these unconventional practices aren’t better solutions to our problems than our standard practice of large commercial farms and peasant farms on communal land.
It is time to clean the slate and start coming up with fresh new ideas that work.