South African Breweries (SAB) would aim to put 5 000 smallholder farmers, to supply its South African operations, into production by 2020, corporate affairs and transformation director Monwabisi Fandeso said on Thursday.
He explained that this initiative formed part of SAB’s newly launched global sustainable development framework Prosper, which was targeted at building strong communities and ensuring business success.
Fandeso further pointed out that, to facilitate this development of small farmers and to ensure adequate offtake for their products, SAB was building an R850-million local malting plant, in Alrode, Gauteng.
Gauteng Department of Rural Development and Agriculture head Thandeka Mbassa said government welcomed this initiative, as SAB currently sourced most of its barley from overseas.
She added that the Gauteng government had ambitious targets in terms of increasing the agriculture sector’s contribution to gross domestic product and, therefore, it was important to enable farmers to “graduate” into agroprocessing.
In addition to the focus on small-scale farmers, the SAB Prosper programme also included other targets, such as reducing the company’s water use by 1 ℓ, to 2.98 ℓ, for every litre of beer produced by 2020.
SAB had also committed to a 30% total value chain carbon footprint reduction by 2020, while continuing to reduce the amount of waste that ended up in landfills.
Further, Fandeso said SAB would also support more than 30 000 small enterprises through the SAB KickStart initiative, and train more than 25 000 liquor traders in responsible retail practices.
He added that the brewer would report on the progress in reaching these targets on a yearly basis, which would keep the company accountable.
Meanwhile, Banking Association MD Cas Coovadia said that, while SAB’s targets were ambitious, “we live in a world where this sort of ambition is necessary”.
He added that if true progress was to be made in terms of sustainable development, a shared platform had to be created to enable businesses to share their best practices.