COMMENT - Land has to be redistributed to get the South African economy going in a way that is meaningful to the people who live in it. - MrK
(FIN24 SA) Michael Bloomberg tells SA: Inaction on inequality could lead to uprising
Mar 08 2018 10:56 Carin Smith
The 8 billionaires who own the same wealth as 3.6bn people
Cape Town - "Income inequality is a problem. If you don’t do something about it, they will set up the guillotines. Marie Antoinette's life did not end well."
That's what Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and regarded as one of the richest people in the world, told a Cape Town audience on Wednesday during an an event with the theme "The Future of South Africa", hosted by Bloomberg LP.
"People take money from the rich and give it to poor for selfish reasons. We don’t want them to set up guillotines, but people want jobs. It is about self-esteem," he said.
Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York, said the three biggest things people worry about in the world at the moment are climate change, then a possible nuclear war and then technology replacing jobs, according to Michael Bloomberg.
"How do you create jobs in a world where it is easy to automate jobs which are easy to train people for? The future is scary and people worry that something will be automated and take their jobs."
READ: The 8 billionaires who own the same wealth as 3.6bn people
Growing employment
Investec Group CEO Stephen Koseff said during a panel discussion at the event that one "can get frightened when listening to Julius Malema talking to 80 000 people in a stadium".
He said it is very important for business to help uplift communities so people can get to the point of looking after themselves. This would reduce social grants.
"Growing the employment base is critical. Reducing poverty is key," said Koseff. Yet, he pointed out that there will always be some form of inequality as one will always have some people doing better than others.
Richard Brasher, CEO of Pick n Pay, said during the panel discussion at the event that, "if the youth has the will, industry can give them skills. They must, however, know that they need to work hard and be disciplined and then they need an opportunity.
READ: Youth vulnerable as unemployment stays at highest rate since 2003
Multiple approach
Magda Wierzycka, CEO at Sygnia asset management, said during the panel discussion that there must be a multiple approach to SA's economic growth.
"Business and government need to come to the party. Don’t rely on the international community. For instance, a lot of money can be deployed in infrastructure programmes," she said.
"Make a law, for instance that 5% of pension fund investments must be in infrastructure. That should accellerate deploying money already in the country into projects that create jobs. I think with the new optimism in the country people will be more willing to do this."
She said a sound process and system are needed and the confidence that money invested will not be wasted or stolen.
She would also like to see SA give tax breaks to lure international technology firms to come here.
"Make it easy to import skills to the country. These skilled people can be used to train our own youth," she said.
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Labels: BLOOMBERG, CYRIL RAMAPHOSA, NEOLIBERALISM
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(NEWZIMBABWE, BLOOMBERG) Tobacco farmers winners of land reform
No regrets ... 110,000 farmers have joined a sector once dominated by 5000
04/11/2013 00:00:00
by Bloomberg
BONUS Matashu points to a three-ton truck he bought for $15,000 in cash and says President Robert Mugabe’s often violent program of seizing white-owned farms and giving them to black Zimbabweans turned around his life.
“This is the best thing that could have happened to me and my family and the generality of black Zimbabweans,” the former machine operator said at his six-hectare farm near the tobacco-farming town of Karoi. “I now lead a far better life.”
Matashu, 34, was allocated land by the government in 2001 after a white-owned farm was seized and its former owner emigrated to South Africa, he said in an interview. He grew cotton for a decade before switching to tobacco. This year he earned $34,000 and won an award for being the best small-scale tobacco farmer in Karoi.
During the turbulence of the farm takeovers, tobacco production in what was the second-biggest exporter of the top quality variety of the crop known as flue-cured plunged to 48.3 million kilograms in 2008 from a record 236.7 million kilograms in 2000, according to the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association. Now it’s making a comeback, with this year’s 166.7 million kilograms earning about $612 million.
Mugabe said he embarked on the land-grab program in 2000 to address the expropriation of land from blacks during the 90 years of white rule that ended after a civil war in 1980. While it helped him win rural votes and retain power, the economy was gripped by a decade of contraction, with plummeting exports of crops ranging from tobacco to roses.
Farmers Killed
About 18 white farmers were killed in violent takeovers of their land while almost all of the country’s 620,000 permanent and seasonal farmworkers were driven away from their homes, John Worsley-Worswick, the head of Justice for Agriculture, a Harare-based lobby group.
Together with dependents those workers accounted for two million people, he said.
“We tackled the enemy head on and we got the land,” agriculture minister Joseph Made said. “They will never, never accept that there are now new owners on the land who have done wonders.”
Most of the rest Zimbabwe’s agricultural industry remains in crisis. The rose and horticulture export business, formerly worth $87 million a year, has largely disappeared.
Once a maize exporter, Zimbabwe has regularly imported the grain in recent years, buying almost 97,000 tons from South Africa since the beginning of May. That’s the most in a single season since at least the marketing season that ended in April 2010, according to South African Grain Information Service data.
Industry Change
The tobacco industry no longer resembles the pattern of large, white-owned, farms, which have been seized and resettled. In 2000 the crop was grown by 1,500 large-scale farmers while 5,000 small-scale growers produced 3 percent of the crop.
This year 110,000 small-scale farmers grew 65 percent of the crop, according to the government’s Tobacco Industry Marketing Board. While most of the tobacco used to be auctioned most is now grown under contract for leaf merchants. Companies including Universal Corp. and Alliance International Inc. buy the crop.
More than a fifth of the growers were registered this year, and farmers are being encouraged to grow the crop in the more arid region of Matabeleland, where little tobacco has been produced before.
“It took the minority more than 50 years to reach 220 million kilograms,” said Lovemore Chikweya, regional coordinator for the TIMB in Nyamandhlovu. “With these new farmers that number can and will be surpassed within five years,” he said, forecasting production at 200 million kilograms in 2014.
China Exports
With the violence associated with the land reform program and a series of disputed election resulting in sanctions from the European Union and the U.S., Zimbabwe’s tobacco farmers are now exporting more of their crop to Asia.
“Our exports to China have grown by over 50 percent,” said Rodney Ambrose, chief executive officer of the Zimbabwe Tobacco Association.
“We have also established new markets particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia.”
This year Chinese buyers acquired $197 million worth of tobacco while Belgium bought $102 million, according to the TIMB.
Zimbabwean tobacco sold for an average of about $3.67 a kilogram this year, the highest since at least 1990, compared with $3.65 for tobacco produced in Brazil, one of the country’s biggest competitors, according to Ambrose.
“People are seeing that you can grow the crop and it comes in handy because the returns are much higher compared to wheat and cabbages,” Shandu Gumede, a 43-year-old farmer in Matabeleland, said in an interview. “I have no regrets.”
Labels: BLOOMBERG, LAND REFORM, TOBACCO
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