page_title: Agriculture in South Africa
section_title: Fruit and wine farming
hierarchical_section_title: Agriculture in South Africa / Crops / Fruit and wine farming
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Vignes palissées
context_page_description: Agriculture in South Africa contributes around 10% of formal employment, relatively low compared to other parts of Africa, as well as providing work for casual laborers and contributing around 2.6 percent of GDP for the nation. Due to the aridity of the land, only 13.5 percent can be used for crop production, and only 3 percent is considered high potential land.
  According to FAOSTAT, South Africa is one of the world's largest producers of: chicory roots; grapefruit; cereals; green maize and maize; castor oil seed; pears; sisal; fibre crops. The dairy industry consists of around 4,300 milk producers providing employment for 60,000 farm workers and contributing to the livelihoods of around 40,000 others.
  The South African government has set a target of transferring 30% of productive farmland to 'previously disadvantaged' blacks by 2014.
context_section_description: Fruits, including grapes for wine, earn as much as 40 percent of agricultural export earnings in some years. (Fresh fruit finds a good market in Europe because it matures during the northern hemisphere's winter.) Deciduous fruits, including apples, pears, and peaches, are grown primarily in areas of the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape, where cold winters and dry summers provide ideal conditions for these crops. Almost 1 million tons of deciduous fruits were sold fresh locally or were exported each year in the early 1990s.
  Pineapples are grown, primarily in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. Tropical fruits—especially bananas, avocados, and mangoes—are also grown, especially in the northeast and some coastal areas. More than half of citrus production is exported in most years. South Africa exported 40 million cartons of citrus fruit in 1994, earning roughly R1.34 billion, according to industry sources.
  More than 1.5 million tons of grapes are used domestically in South Africa's renowned wine industry, which dates back to the seventeenth-century vineyards introduced by French Huguenot immigrants. More than 100,000 hectares of land are planted in vineyards, centred primarily in the Western Cape. Smaller vineyards are also found in the Northern Cape, Free State, and Northern Province. One of the noticeable signs of the end of international sanctions against South Africa was a dramatic increase in worldwide demand for South African wines in 1994 and 1995.
caption: Vineyard in Stellenbosch
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