Sowing the seeds In South Africa, the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government is launching a crop-planting initiative to improve food security across the region. The ZAR160 million government funded programme will provide subsistence and smallholder farmers across KwaZulu-Natal’s 11 district municipalities with tractors, farming equipment and seeds, as reported by the South African Government News Agency. According to Bongi Sithole-Moloi, MEC for Agriculture and Rural Development, it is hoped that the flagship programme will be the first of many that transform the lives of farmers ‘who struggle to produce adequate crops due to the lack of operational farming resources’. The project launch has been timed to coincide with the start of the province’s planting season. 17 September 2019 Image: Gallo/Getty Images