Page 448 - Provincial Treasury Estimates.pdf

Department: Rural Development and Agrarian Reform

Six District Planning Models will be supported, also 8 basic infrastructure projects are planned.
Furthermore, 106 rural enterprises will be supported and a total of 4 IGR sessions conducted. ECRDA will
continue playing its role as our implementing Agency mainly focusing on high impact projects.

Two cannabis incubators in OR Tambo (Magwa Tea Estate) and Amathole (Dohne ADI) will be provided
with operational and infrastructure support to ensure that they are fully established. These incubators
once fully established will focus in medical and industrial cultivation, extraction, processing with
aggregation points for land race cannabis. Furthermore, incubators will drive research and technology
development of Cannabis in the Province. These incubators will focus in medical and industrial cultivation,
extraction, processing with aggregation points for land race cannabis.

4. 4. Reprioritisation

The department undertook an extensive reprioritization from Compensation of employees (CoE), Goods
and Services to Transfers and subsidies and Payments for capital assets to redirect funding towards the
Blended Finance Scheme, Aquaculture Development project, and upgrading of veterinary laboratory and
servers and to fund the continuation of the Rural Market center initiative.

Reprioritization was also undertaken within Goods and Services items to cater for under-budgeted
contractual obligations (Medicine for animals, communication, fleet services, computer services) of the
department which were affected by the baseline reductions.

In addition, reprioritisation was undertaken to provide for shortfall in respect of travelling and subsistence
of the core service delivery programmes in Sustainable Resource Management for engineers, Agricultural
Producer Support and Development for Agricultural Advisors, Veterinary Services for Animal Health
Technicians and Research and Technology for Researchers, as travelling in the mentioned category of
workers is the main driver of the delivery of the service. However, the department continued to protect its
service delivery programme in order to deliver on its mandate.

5. 5. Procurement

The department issued an expression of interest to invite service providers to enter into framework
agreements/ term contracts to procure agricultural production inputs, household vegetable inputs and
seedlings for a period not exceeding 36 months. The department will continue to source quotations when
needed thereby reducing the time it takes to procure through advertisement for each commodity. Also,
service providers on the database will be rotated as per their close geographical proximity to the district
they have an agreement with. This will ensure that all suppliers get a chance to submit their bids and
compete on price and BBBEE. Furthermore, an expression of interest will be issued annually for other
services providers who are not in the database and are interested to render these services for them to
apply for inclusion in the database
The department will continue to use limited bidding for professional service providers who are already in
the database of the department (hydrogeologist, environmental impact assessors), as well as
mechanisation service providers who have displayed good performance in the previous season.
Open competitive bidding will continue for all support services such as security services, communication
and computer services. Transversal contracts will be used for veterinary medicine, courier services, mobile
services as well as photocopier services. The department will continue to support Local Development
(LED) through its procurement processes.

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