The North West Provincial Government is upbeat about the R4 million Danish funding that the Presidency has secured for development of Taung Agriculture College as a centre of excellence for irrigation training.

Premier Thandi Modise has expressed optimism that the donor funding will assist in the repositioning of Taung Agriculture College as a centre of excellence in irrigation technology in line with its agro-ecological zone.

The establishment of a provincial task team led by the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development supported by the Presidency, in collaboration with Greater Taung Local Municipality and the Department of Social Development, Women. Youth and People with Disability and the appointment of the Agriculture Research Council as an implementing agent were supported by the Provincial Executive Council (Exco) in its meeting this week.

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Although structural impediments such as poor logistics render the search for new avenues of deeper intra-African trade challenging’ there is an immediate and compelling growth potential in the trade of agricultural products’ Standard Bank research analyst Simon Freemantle said last week.

“Here even basic improvements in the continent’s trade’ storage and transport infrastructure’ coupled with ongoing initiatives to elevate agricultural productivity’ have the ability to reap immediate’ and potentially huge gains’” he said.

According to the African Union (AU)’ intra-African agricultural trade has accounted for an average of one-fifth of Africa’s total agricultural trade for the past five years. This compared with an average in the European Union of 78%’ and an Asian average of 60%. In some areas’ Africa’s deficit is even more pronounced: in 2011′ just 3% of all African cereal imports originated on the continent.

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The government is to convene a food summit to plan improved food security for cities Minister in The Presidency Trevor Manuel has told residents of Khayelitsha, on the Cape Flats.

He was speaking at a presentation of the objectives, between now and 2030, of the National Planning Commission, which he heads.

Manuel was responding to a recent survey that revealed that only one in 10 households in Khayelitsha and Philippi townships could be regarded as “food secure”.

Households are said to be food secure when they have physical and economic access to sufficient nutrition for a healthy life.

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South African farmers are coming to the aid of their Mozambican counterparts, whose lands were devastated in the flooding that killed more than 80 people and put the lives of thousands at risk.

Many farms in southern Mozambique are under water. Equipment, crops and seed have been destroyed and thousands of animals drowned.

The cost of the flooding has yet to be determined.

“It is millions and millions of dollars,” said Gaza provincial agriculture director Ernesto Paulino.

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Seven years after a government feasibility study showed a biofuels industry in South Africa could create tens of thousands of new jobs, the paperwork needed to establish it remains outstanding.

Briefing MPs, the energy department’s chief director for clean energy, Mokgadi Modise, said the original target of producing 400 million litres of biofuels a year, from the 2013 financial year on, “will be missed”.

However, the country was set to produce biofuels “in excess of the originally-set annual target when the overall enabling and supporting framework… takes effect”.

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