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Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses processes of industrialisation in the South African beef industry, and their social and environmental consequences. It explores the drivers of these processes, and shows how they produce new forms of exclusion and locks-ins to unsustainable development pathways.

Paper long abstract:

The paper analyses processes of industrialisation in the South African beef industry, and their social and environmental consequences. Beef production is a central component of the South African agrarian economy, and a key feature of diets and cuisine. However, competition from cheaper, intensively-produced poultry, rising input prices, environmental change, and biosecurity challenges have created intense economic pressures, accelerating concentration and intensification. The industry is increasingly dominated by powerful, vertically-integrated feedlots, lynchpins of a grain livestock complex involving large-scale commercial grain farming and industrial feed milling. The industry is increasingly pivoting towards export-markets as a means to continue its growth. As the paper discusses, these processes have complex outcomes for sustainability and inclusion. Industrialisation processes and heightened biosecurity measures raise barriers to entry for small-scale livestock farmers and are in tension with systems of social reproduction in communal areas. Meanwhile, though intensive production methods produce lower point-source emissions, growth ambitions potentially complicate sectoral emissions targets, and risk creating multiple ‘lock-ins’ and path dependencies for intensive meat production that creates other important externalities.