How to boost profits for SA’s small-scale farmers — the biotechnology vs agroecology debate

Household food insecurity is widespread in South Africa, and most harshly felt in rural areas. Nearly 19% of households have poor diets with inadequate nutrition and ultra processed food that is more affordable and curbs hunger but lacks the protein, vitamins and minerals needed to be healthy. 

The DG Murray Trust said on 9 October 2025: “To tackle this, we need to make fresh produce more accessible and affordable in poorer communities where it’s needed most. The problem is that smallholder farmers in these areas face a raft of challenges that include lack of access to financial resources to fund their operations, few training and mentorship opportunities, and no one to walk the journey with them from production to accessing local markets.”

There are a number of interventions aimed at supporting small-scale farmers – some from opposing schools of thought but all aimed at enabling small-scale farmers to not only self-sustain but also make an income and access markets. This article looks at biotechnology versus agroecology as ways to help these farmers to become profitable.

Biotechnology 

Lebogang Madubanya from Agricultural Research Council is a leading expert on the regulation, adoption and impact of biotechnology in South Africa and has collaborated with the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) for more than a decade on drought mitigation projects. He is the co-author of a recent peer-reviewed study on TELA® Bt maize adoption in South Africa, which showed that farmers who adopted the variety achieved 61% higher yields and 33% higher incomes per hectare compared with non-adopters. Madubanya was also part of the Water Efficient Maize for Africa initiative.

Madubanya spoke to Daily Maverick about how South Africa is leading Africa’s genetically modified crop revolution. He says evidence from farmers in Limpopo and Mpumalanga shows that Bt maize reduces pest damage and drought losses, enabling farmers to grow more food and increase incomes despite harsh weather. The Agriculture Research Council offers genetically modified seeds that are resistant to pests, which means they would need fewer pesticides, and produce drought-resistant crops.

“So, in a nutshell, biotechnology improves the livelihood of resource-poor farmers. The main drive was to try and leverage our smallholder farmers so that they are on the same playing field as commercial farmers. Of course, the commercial producers, you find that somebody is producing on a 2,000-hectare plot compared to Mrs X who is using only 1.2ha,” Madubanya said. 

This, he said, brings up the land question. While access to more land for small-scale farmers was significant, the first order of business should be “providing our farmers with the necessary tools that they need so that even with their smallish plots they are still able to farm sustainably, to feed themselves and feed the nation. So, there’s a whole thing of take the land, take the land, but you can’t take the land without any knowledge.”

Madubanya added that while one would assume this intervention would be welcomed with open arms, some of the communities in which they have done demonstrations have been resistant.

He cited the example of an Mpumalanga farmer, an “old man” who “used to farm like everybody else”. 

Madubanya’s team, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture, went to that province and “we said we want a couple of farmers, we just want to do demos just to demonstrate our products that we developed as the Agriculture Research Council. We then planted with the farmer and then came the time, normally around February, when there’s diseases, all sorts of diseases. And when the disease hit, everybody around they had yellow, highly infested maize crops.

“But the farmer that we planted with, he had a very well-thriving field, and  green, showing that it is healthy. So people around started looking at that old man in a little bit of a funny way. I don’t have the exact word to use, but they were calling him a moloi (witch).”

Consequently, the farmer was stuck with his yields because people refused to buy from him, because they believed they had been produced in an unnatural way that they didn’t understand.

“He then called us and said, ‘hey, you guys, you are getting me in trouble with this maize crop of yours. He was used to harvesting less than a tonne from his field, [but] this particular year he had more than four tonnes… The community was not willing to buy from him because they say that is witchcraft. ‘It is impossible. How do you get something like that?’ We realised we needed to invest a lot on information sharing and do a lot more demonstrations, trials, you name it. And that’s exactly what we did.”

It worked so well that the farmers were able to pool their higher yields and start a milling company. Now, “when they produce, they know they are not producing only for subsistence, they are producing to feed themselves and have income”.

It all proved that it was possible to tackle household food insecurity by giving resource-poor farmers technical tools to enable them to “contribute also to some extent to the country’s GDP”. 

“Biotechnology is a very broad field. The biotechnology that we do is actually set up in such a way that it resolves the production constraints that our resource-poor farmers face that make their farming practices a little bit more challenging in the sense that they have to spend a lot of money. We devise biotech tools to assist them to be able to farm more profitably.”

Madubanya added that farmers have to adhere to government regulations pertaining to the seeds.

Agroecology

On the other side of the debate, the African Centre for Biodiversity and other civil society groups extol the benefits of natural farming practices.

While “conventionally bred, drought-tolerant maize might not pose the biosafety concerns that the GM variety does, it is still part of an aim to build a seed industry in Africa that is driven by the private sector, through the adoption of hybrid maize varieties. But time and again, we have seen that real solutions do not lie with corporations or the industrial model of agriculture, but, instead, with farmers, in farmers’ fields, and with farmer-managed seed systems,” the centre wrote in a fact check.

The centre argues that solutions lie with farmers’ knowledge to create healthy soils that store more water under drought conditions and how to grow a diversity of crops to create the resilience needed to face increased unpredictability in weather patterns. 

“Agroecology draws on farmers’ knowledge and experiences, and there is growing international recognition that a paradigm shift towards diversified agroecological systems is necessary and urgent, particularly in the face of climate change. Agroecology outperforms conventional agriculture on many fronts, whether from an economic, environmental, health, social or cultural perspective. Evidence is particularly strong on the ability of agroecology to deliver strong and stable yields by building environmental and climate resilience,” the centre wrote.

To better understand the factors that have enabled successful agroecology projects, the DG Murray Trust commissioned research into various small-scale farming initiatives spearheaded by NGOs. 

Its report looked at four areas: “Value chains for seeds and seedlings; how local markets work for smallholder farmers and what drives market access; how biodiversity practices can complement production; and if the production of protein-rich foods like eggs and beans can be decentralised to improve nutrition of households in poorer areas.

“What we have learnt from civil society organisations implementing agroecology practices is that with the right enabling factors, we can reduce hunger, create livelihoods and restore local ecosystems,” says Busisiwe Kabane-Bailey, innovation director at the trust. DM