On the very first page of The End of Animal Farming, author Jacy Reese makes it clear that the book is not about why animal farming is bad. There have been plenty of books chronicling the damage caused by factory farms, but his book is about how to solve animal farming itself.
A tiny tree-killing beetle with the awkwardly long name of Polyphagous Shothole Borer was detected in South Africa for the first time last year. It’s now attacking and inserting its deadly fungal ally, Fusarium euwallaceae, in a wider array of tree species across a much wider geographical area.
Earlier this year, Nick Serfontein wrote an open letter to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa asking him to take the views of white farmers on board as the government considers expropriating land without compensation to reduce rural poverty.
South Africa's land reforms will include issuing title deeds to small-scale farmers living on tribal lands, a senior ANC official said on Friday. This is a comment that will rile the traditional chiefs.
Oudtshoorn farmers, who had their own Day Zero almost a year ago when their irrigation dams dried up, have suffered losses of hundreds of millions of rands in lost production.
Land reform remains one of South Africa’s most pressing unresolved issues. Attempts to address skewed ownership and economic participation patterns, the result of many years of exclusion and dispossession of black South Africans, have been unsuccessful since 1994. The present government has now turned to possible changes to the Constitution to deal with these failures.
