Transformation is high on SAMAC’s priority lists, with 20% of its budget spent on black economic empowerment.
Roughly sixty percent of this money is used for enterprise development, 18% on skills development, 17% on management control and 5% on socio-economic development.
One of the goals of transformation is to help commercialise smallholder growers through training courses, information days, support services to ensure the farmers have the necessary skills to produce macadamias that comply with market demands.
Farmers are also encouraged to form study groups to learn from each other through the sharing of production observations and challenges and SAMAC assists farmers to acquire GLOBAL GAP, the world standard for good agricultural practices, and or HACCP, a food safety standard, when this is a market requirement.
Roughly 60% of the farmer-beneficiaries are situated in Limpopo, 25% in Mpumalanga, 10% in Natal and 5% in the Eastern Cape.
The empowerment of new entrants and the young people is another goal of SAMAC’s transformation efforts. To this end, SAMAC annually funds undergraduate and postgraduate studies in crop production and horticulture and has partnered with RecruitAgri to help give students access to practical on-farm training and work experience.
Macadamia nuts were already established in the Durban Botanical Gardens in South Africa in 1915, the source of which is still unknown. Comme...