Advancing a holistic systems approach for sustainable cattle development programmes in South Africa: insights from sustainability assessments

Efforts to exploit the central roles of cattle to drive agriculture and rural development in low-income countries recorded limited success owing to their narrow focus on modernizing and commercializing low-input cattle farming. Most programs failed to take cognizance of the heterogeneous range of complex relationships between the environmental, economic, social and institutional challenges that limit low-input cattle farming. The current qualitative literature review evaluates the environmental, economic and social sustainability delivery impacts of the leading cattle development programs in the low-input farming sector in South Africa using a holistic systems approach. A mixed method procedure involving stratified sampling was used to allocate local and international-based programs while, purposive sampling was used to select programs with a wider scale of operation. The review then draws on the crosscutting key constraints emerging from the case studies to provide a better grounding for subsequent sustainability sensitive recommendations. Local-based cattle development programs advanced more market-led interventions while, their international-based counterparts had more interventions including, soil and rangeland improvement. The narrow focus by both local and international developmental programs is inadequate to address a wide array of environmental, economic, social, technical and institutional challenges faced by low-input cattle producers in South Africa.The Department of Science and Technology-National Research Foundation (DST-NRF) Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Food Security [140102].https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjsa212021-01-23hj2020Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS

South Africa’s domestic resource mobilization position: is it good or bad and why

This paper presents a case study on South Africa’s resource mobilisation. Domestic resource mobilisation is defined as the generation of savings from domestic resources and encouragement of investments from foreign investors to create a big domestic resource pull and the allocation of resources to economically and socially productive sectors. In South Africa, government fiscal policy and the monetary policy as well as the expenditure systems are well developed. The government lead institutions in the domestic resource mobilisation include, and not limited to, National Treasury, South African Receiver of Revenue (SARS), South African Reserve Bank (SARB), Fiscal and Financial Commission (FFS), and Statistics South Africa. The market oriented financial system of South Africa implies minimum state interventions as market mechanism is assumed to achieve the highest efficiency in terms of resource allocation. However, government acknowledge that market imperfections do occasionally arise and that intervention by way of regulation is sometimes justified. The government therefore promulgates legislation and creates regulatory authorities and authorise them to influence the economy according to government policy. South Africa has put in place strong administrative measures to ensure efficient tax collection process, however, the country still experiences large loses in the form of illicit financial flows. It is estimated that the country lost over US$ 24 billion in the last decade. South Africa’s domestic resource mobilisation status has been very good, however, recently a number of variables that are used to measure the healthy nature of this are going the opposite direction