Patterns of Engagement for Smallholder Farmers in Accessing Government Markets in South Africa

The South African Government's drive to empower smallholder farmers through preferentially facilitated access to procurement opportunities should be concomitantly matched with the smallholder capacity to deliver. However, there has been little information from the literature to examine the smallholder farmers' predisposition toward aggregation or whether they would prefer to remain independent from any form of organization to enhance their capacity. The study was undertaken, based on a simple random selection of the smallholder farmers in the district of Thabo Mofutsanyane. The results indicate that despite the perceived benefits of belonging to a group, about half of the smallholder farmers would prefer to remain independent from any form of aggregation or farmer group. The results are an antithesis to the common literature opinion on farmer grouping or aggregation. On the other hand, it may be that smallholder farmers would subscribe to coming together for collective benefit, but currently, do not have a formal governance structure or group account. The results provide an alert that while the government considers group operations such as cooperatives as a potential mechanism to deepen empowerment, it remains a challenge to properly entrench such notion for collective group operations beyond the means of the smallholder farmers to access resources.