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Smallholder agricultural sector in South Africa is regarded as one of the main livelihood options for the majority of people living in rural areas. As such, many of the poorest people living in rural areas regard smallholder subsistence agriculture as an important strategy to move out of food poverty and malnutrition. Food security has since been the goal that needs to be achieved by every nation given the agricultural sector reason to be productive enough to meet the food demand of each nation. The purpose of this paper is to provide information on the role and potential of smallholder farmers as being the drivers of achieving food security in South Africa. The paper identifies key references backing up this claim and suggests some recommendations which could help improve the synergy between food security and productivity of smallholder farmers in South Africa.

European colonial conquest included many instances of indigenous peoples being exterminated. Cases where invading commercial stock farmers clashed with hunter-gatherers were particularly destructive, often resulting in a degree of dispossession and slaughter that destroyed the ability of these societies to reproduce themselves. The experience of aboriginal peoples in the settler colonies of southern Africa, Australia, North America, and Latin America bears this out. The frequency with which encounters of this kind resulted in the annihilation of forager societies raises the question of whether these conflicts were inherently genocidal, an issue not yet addressed by scholars in a systematic way.

The adoption of conservation agriculture among small-scale farmers is still low despite the proven economic and environmental benefits of the technology. This study was conducted in Ingwe Municipality in Kwa-Zashuke, Ward 8, in KwaZulu-Natal province. The main aim of the study was to determine the factors that influence the adoption of no-till conservation agriculture (CA) in the study area and to explore farmers’ perceptions of no-till CA and the impact of no-till CA on maize yield. A quantitative approach employing a cross-sectional design was used to gather data. Stratified random sampling was employed and a total of 185 small-scale farmers (97 adopters and 88 non-adopters) were sampled. Data analysis was done through descriptive and inferential statistics and econometric modeling using the logistic regression model. Findings show that farmers’ positive perceptions were positively correlated with higher maize yields. While an increase in extension visits, age, education and farmers’ positive perceptions significantly increased the likelihood of a farmer adopting no-till CA, an increase in land size was negatively related to no-till CA adoption. The findings confirm the important role of extension in the promotion of no-till CA, particularly the intensity of the extension services. The study recommends a deliberate effort by all stakeholders to promote the participation of young people in farming and tailor-make current no-till CA programs to suit the illiterate households. The capacity of extension programs to adequately support farmers should be enhanced through improvements in extension services. There is also need to change people’s mindsets and the way they view no-till CA.

This paper follows the transition from ethnobotany to a deeper scientific understanding of the food and medicinal properties of African agroforestry tree products as inputs into the start of domestication activities. It progresses on to the integration of these indigenous trees as new crops within diversified farming systems for multiple social, economic and environmental benefits. From its advent in the 1990s, the domestication of indigenous food and non-food tree species has become a global programme with a strong African focus. This review of progress in the third decade is restricted to progress in Africa, where multi-disciplinary research on over 59 species has been reported in 759 research papers in 318 science publications by scientists from over 833 research teams in 70 countries around the world (532 in Africa). The review spans 23 research topics presenting the recent research literature for tree species of high priority across the continent, as well as that in each of the four main ecological regions: the humid zone of West and Central Africa; the Sahel and North Africa; the East African highlands and drylands; and the woody savannas of Southern Africa. The main areas of growth have been the nutritional/medicinal value of non-timber forest products; the evaluation of the state of natural resources and their importance to local people; and the characterization of useful traits. However, the testing of putative cultivars; the implementation of participatory principles; the protection of traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights; and the selection of elite trees and ideotypes remain under-researched. To the probable detriment of the upscaling and impact in tropical agriculture, there has been, at the international level, a move away from decentralized, community-based tree domestication towards a laboratory-based, centralized approach. However, the rapid uptake of research by university departments and national agricultural research centres in Africa indicates a recognition of the importance of the indigenous crops for both the livelihoods of rural communities and the revitalization and enhanced outputs from agriculture in Africa, especially in West Africa. Thus, on a continental scale, there has been an uptake of research with policy relevance for the integration of indigenous trees in agroecosystems and their importance for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. To progress this in the fourth decade, there will need to be a dedicated Centre in Africa to test and develop cultivars of indigenous crops. Finally, this review underpins a holistic approach to mitigating climate change, as well as other big global issues such as hunger, poverty and loss of wildlife habitat by reaping the benefits, or ‘profits’, from investment in the five forms of Capital, described as ‘land maxing’. However, policy and decision makers are not yet recognizing the potential for holistic and transformational adoption of these new indigenous food crop opportunities for African agriculture. Is ‘political will’ the missing sixth capital for sustainable development?

After several decades of research on the subject, we now know when the first livestock reached southern Africa but the question of how they got there remains a contentious topic. Debate centres on whether they were brought with a large migration of Khoe-speakers who originated from East Africa; or whether the livestock were traded down-the-line among hunter-gatherer communities; or indeed whether there was a long history of diverse small scale population movements in this part of the world, one or more of which 'infiltrated' livestock into southern Africa. A new analysis of the distribution of stone toolkits from a sizeable sample of sub-equatorial African Later Stone Age sites, coupled with existing knowledge of the distribution of the earliest livestock remains and ceramics vessels, has allowed us to isolate two separate infiltration events that brought the first livestock into southern Africa just over 2000 years ago; one infiltration was along the Atlantic seaboard and another entered the middle reaches of the Limpopo River Basin. These findings agree well with the latest results of genetic research which together indicate that multiple, small-scale infiltrations probably were responsible for bringing the first livestock into southern Africa.

Southern Africa is consistently placed as a potential region for the evolution of Homo sapiens. We present genome sequences, up to 13x coverage, from seven ancient individuals from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The remains of three Stone Age hunter-gatherers (about 2000 years old) were genetically similar to current-day southern San groups, and those of four Iron Age farmers (300 to 500 years old) were genetically similar to present-day Bantu-language speakers. We estimate that all modern-day Khoe-San groups have been influenced by 9 to 30% genetic admixture from East Africans/Eurasians. Using traditional and new approaches, we estimate the first modern human population divergence time to between 350,000 and 260,000 years ago. This estimate increases the deepest divergence among modern humans, coinciding with anatomical developments of archaic humans into modern humans, as represented in the local fossil record.

Digital technology has the potential to eradicate extreme poverty and food insecurity to the majority of smallholder farmers in the world. This paper aims to identify knowledge gaps on digital technology for sustainable agriculture and assess their availability to smallholder farmers worldwide. The particular case of Tanzania receives special attention. We conducted an extensive literature search from relevant databases for review. The advanced digital technology in agriculture, mostly used by large scale farmers, significantly contributes to sustainable agriculture. However, the existing digital services for smallholder farmers lack sustainability in the agriculture context and hardly meet the needs for a comprehensive set of services in a complete farming cycle. In most developing countries, Tanzania case included, digital technology and services respond to a challenge at a particular stage of the farming process or to a specific value chain. Based on this literature review, we identify inequalities among large and small farmers, as well as environmental challenges caused by ICT itself. To conclude we provide suggestions for improvements for smallholder farmers: developing a digital platform that addresses smallholder farmers’ challenges in a complete farming cycle, bringing together the stakeholders at a country level, in order to achieve sustainable agriculture and support adoption of cutting-edge digital technology. These suggestions will be the starting point for future research.

This paper is a response to the growing reference to archaeological evidence by linguists and geneticists interested in the spread of early farmers and pastoralists in southern Africa. It presents two databases. The first contains the archaeological evidence for pastoralism and farming in southern Africa, for the period 550 BC to AD 1050. This is the first time that the seven different types of archaeological evidence that have traditionally been used to identify both spread events are presented together at this scale. This was stimulated by our interest in investigating the antiquity of an early 'Iron Age package' relative to the spread of single archaeological traits. The analysis shows that the package appears approximately 700 years after sites containing pottery, cattle and sheep, without agriculture, appear in the drier parts of the sub-continent. It post-dates the appearance of earlier sites with pottery associated with farmers, metal-working and cultivation in the eastern half of the sub-continent. While poor preservation undoubtedly explains the absence of some parts of the package, the analysis suggests that other explanations should be considered. The second database is a quantitative, spatial study of archaeological publications on southern African farming and pastoralism for the period 1950 to 2016, covering the same geographical area and archaeological timeframe. This is presented as a proxy for research-intensive areas in attempt to show the gaps in archaeological fieldwork and knowledge.

Despite their ubiquity in Holocene African archaeological assemblages, ostrich eggshell (OES) beads are rarely studied in detail. An exception is in southern Africa, where there is a proposed relationship between OES bead diameter and the arrival of herding ~2000 years before present. In 1987, Leon Jacobson first observed that beads from forager sites in Namibia tended to be smaller than those associated with herder sites. Studies examining bead size around the Western Cape have generally confirmed Jacobson's findings, though the driving forces of the diameter change remain unknown. Since this time, diameter has become an informal way of distinguishing forager and herder assemblages in southern Africa, but no large-scale studies of OES bead variation have been undertaken. Here we present an expanded analysis of Holocene OES bead diameters from southern, and for the first time, eastern Africa. Results reveal distinct patterns in OES bead size over time, reflecting different local dynamics associated with the spread of herding. In southern Africa, OES diameters display low variability and smaller absolute size through time. While larger beads begin to appear <2000 years ago, most beads in our study remained smaller. In contrast, eastern African OES bead diameters are consistently larger over the last 10,000 years and show no appreciable size change with the introduction of herding. Notably, larger beads thought to be associated with herders in southern Africa fall within the range of eastern African beads, indicating a potential connection between these regions in the Late Holocene consistent with genetic findings. Regional differences in bead size are subtle, on the order of millimeters, yet offer a potentially important line of evidence for investigating the spread of herding in sub-Saharan Africa. In order to understand the meaning of these changes, we encourage additional studies of OES bead assemblages and urge researchers to report individual bead diameters, rather than averages by level.