It’s been more than six years since the AgriBEE Fund, a grant initiative by the government to help black farmers purchase equity in farms or invest in agro-processing and value-adding of their produce, but only one deal has been funded.
Part of it could be understood, as the AgriBEE Charter Council and the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries argued because the fund was suspended for two years.
It was suspended because of fraudulent activities at the Land Bank which manages the AgriBEE Fund. But even today, three years since those activities prompted the fund’s suspension, the matter is “still hanging” as the department’s director-general, Edith Vries, put it in Parliament yesterday.
But although suspended, annual allocations from the Treasury continued to flow into the fund, R35 million every year since the 2006/07 financial year. Allocating funds to a course that is under investigation for fraud and whose activities are suspended does not make much sense.
But the funds continued to flow and the chairman of Parliament’s portfolio committee on agriculture, forestry and fisheries, Lulu Johnson, said farmers had been reporting to him that they were rejected left, right and centre by the fund.
Last year, the department received 67 applications for AgriBEE funding. The department recommended only six to go through the Land Bank’s screening and due diligence processes.
The fund excludes the purchase of farms, farming, forestry or fishing infrastructure at primary level making it difficult for previously marginalised farmworkers, who never owned anything, to buy equity even if they practically ran the farm operations themselves. READ MORE.
Source: www.iol.co.za #IFAMAFRICA
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