Food system resilience through enhanced productive efficiency: evidence from smallholder farmers in South Africa

The resilience of smallholder food system remains critical for sustained food security, income generation, and employment particularly at household level in South Africa. This smallholder food system also carries potential for transition to commercial farming in the long term. The study set out to examine food system resilience through enhanced productive efficiency for smallholder raisins, wool, and broiler producers across nine provinces. We applied the stochastic production frontier model on cross-sectional data obtained from 173 producers. Results show that inefficiency undermines the resilience of food production system in smallholder farming. This challenge is more severe in broiler producers compared to wool and raisins producers. Despite this, a unit increase in labour and investment spending is associated with 0.43%, and 0.52% increase in agricultural output. Overall, the coefficients add-up to a value of 1.09, indicating that agricultural production in smallholder farming achieved increasing returns to scales. This implies that the proportion of increase in output is more than the increase in inputs. But for resilience and sustainability of smallholder food system, producers can still increase productive efficiency by 61% without changing inputs. Policy should focus on addressing inefficiencies through extension services that provides education and training; encouraging government and the private sector to collaborate in efforts to invest in smallholder development; and development and implementation of a national transformation plan for smallholder producers.