# _3.2.1 Production and employment_

The model contains 40 sectors/commodities, including 17 agricultural and 15 industrial sectors.<sup>7</sup> Agricultural production is divided into field crops (summer cereals; winter cereals; oil crops and legumes; fodder crops; cotton and tobacco; and sugarcane), horticultural crops (vegetables; citrus fruit; subtropical fruit; deciduous fruit and viticulture; and other horticulture), livestock (livestock sales; dairy; poultry; and other livestock products) and fishing and forestry.<sup>8</sup> Field crops are further separated into irrigated and rainfed whereas all horticultural production is assumed irrigated. Together, these agricultural sub-sectors account for 4.3 percent of national gross domestic product (GDP) – making agriculture a relatively small part of the South African economy (see Table 3). By contrast, the industrial sectors comprise one-third of national GDP, ranging from the more capital-intensive mining, metals and energy sectors, to the more laborintensive food processing, textiles and construction.

One key new and unique feature of this SA Water SAM (SAWSAM) is modeling production and consumption activities by WMA. This is of crucial relevance to water resources management and policy institutions such as DWAF and the newly established catchment management agencies (CMAs) as all their current and future allocation plans and strategies are drawn based on WMAs as the principal geographic units of management. Agricultural and nonagricultural production in the SAWSAM model is therefore disaggregated across each of SA’s 19 WMAs<sup>9</sup> . The characteristics of these WMAs vary considerably (see Tables 4 and 5). For example, agriculture is only one percent of the Upper Vaal’s GDP (i.e., Gauteng Province), but more than a third of

> 7 Appendix A1 lists sectors and Appendix Tables A2.1 and A2.2 report model’s variables and equations. 8 Agriculture is disaggregated across sub-sectors using the 2002 Census of Commercial Agriculture (StatsSA, 2002) and the 2006 Abstract of Agricultural Statistics (DOA, 2007). Commercial agriculture comprised 45, 818 active farming units in 2002 (StatSA, 2002), occupying 87% of total agricultural land and produces 95% of marketed agricultural output (Vink and Kirsten, 2003). The remaining agricultural land is cultivated by ‘emergent’ or subsistence farmers, the actual number of whom is not well established with estimates ranging between 300,000 to a million (Johann Kirsten personal communications).

> 9 See Figure 1 for a map showing the 19 WMAs. Sectoral production in the Water-SAM was disaggregated across WMAs using municipal-district-level information from the regional version of the South African Standard Industrial database (Quantec, 2007). Aggregate agricultural production was further disaggregated across WMAs using magisterial-district-level information from the 2002 Census of Commercial Agriculture (StatsSA, 2002). Districts were mapped to WMAs if a majority of their land area fell within the area’s boundary. In total there are 874 representative producers in the model (each of the 19 WMAs contain 40 sectors, with the 6 field crops further disaggregated into irrigated and rainfed).

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