by Dan Roodt
The news that South Africa supplies 70% of the citrus fruit consumed in the European Union adds another ingredient to the debate around farmland in South Africa. In strictly economic terms, both farm murders and ANC’s radical land reform plans serve European protectionist interests.
Our farmers are almost superhuman. Against all odds, they manage to compete against the pampered, subsidised EU agricultural producers. They live within a virtual war zone of terrorist attacks on farms, hostile propaganda from the left-liberal media and concerted attempts by neo-Marxist think tanks like the Cape-based PLAAS that advocate the abolition of property rights altogether.
The ANC government is amenable to the radicals of PLAAS, such Dr. Ruth Hall, an Afrikaner-hating, Oxford academic who came to this country with the sole intention of instigating a Soviet-style “agrarian revolution” that would push Afrikaners off their ancestral, family-owned lands. In the process, agriculture as we know it will be destroyed and our sought-after fruit will again disappear off European supermarket shelves as in the days of the anti-apartheid boycott against South Africa when French communists and Dutch anarchists focussed their hate on the word “Outspan”.
Apart from the teaching profession, there are few areas of economic activity in South Africa that are so dominated by Afrikaners as agriculture. To understand why, one must briefly look at the history of this country. During the nineteenth century, colonial British mining companies snapped up all the minerals in the old Boer republics and when that wasn’t enough, they persuaded Britain to invade us, burn all our farms and put our women and children in concentration camps.
In the cities, Afrikaners were discriminated against and even forbidden to speak their language in stores. With most of business, mining and industry closed to us, we had only farming and the professions open to us. That is how Afrikaners doggedly stuck to agriculture, through droughts and crises, and managed to get fifty percent of the postgraduate qualifications in this country. We also produced a large number of accountants, doctors and lawyers.
With the ANC’s revolutionary takeover, the first thing they did was to apply stringent affirmative action to our medical schools so that hardly any Afrikaner physicians are being trained anymore. The legal profession was dumbed down so that just about anybody could get a degree and even a mediocre advocate could become a judge, as long as he happened to be black. Accounting standards are still being upheld, but one wonders for how long before racial quotas will be applied there too.
Agriculture therefore represents a last economic foothold for Afrikaners. Despite European and American protectionism, we have managed to carve out a niche in the world market. Our beautiful, tasty, healthy oranges and grapefruit grace the breakfast tables of Europe.
However, when EU Commissioner Catherine Ashton and the South African Minister of International Relations, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, met yesterday in Brussels, there was no-one representing the Afrikaner interest around the table. Neither the protectionist EU, nor the anti-white, anti-Afrikaans ANC, gives two hoots about our economic survival in this country. We are already excluded from government, from the big corporations, from the mines, from the bench, from hospitals and banks.
Once our academics were able to build some of the finest universities in this country and in the world. Yet even there, the imperatives of “transformation” have dictated our exclusion on racial and cultural grounds from the very institutions our fathers and grandfathers had founded and developed. Foreign academics from the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and other African countries have flocked to our universities to displace us, the indigenous whites of South Africa.
Until now, the European Union has said nothing about the vicious attacks on our farmers. Unless Europeans want to be seen as siding with the radical, ethnocentric and even genocidal elements in this country who wish to ethnically cleanse Afrikaners from the land, they will have to speak out and condemn such attacks.
At the same time, we insist upon open access to the EU market in fruit as it is one of the few lifelines we have left in this left-fascist environment where an alliance of UK academics and farm killers threaten to destabilise our agriculture further, or even destroy it completely.
We also appeal to European political parties sympathetic to Afrikaners to voice their concerns about maintaining the health of our exports and trade. Stability needs to return, against the outlandish ideas of “land reform” advocated by unreconstructed communists. “Land reform” is a slogan for extending the full-spectrum racial dominance that we already experience in the rest of the economy and the public sector, but it will also serve those in Europe who see a threat in our honest and fair competition with them.
