Zimbabwe’s Growing Appetite for Wheat
Zimbabwe is increasingly consuming more wheaten products. Over the past five years, the country’s wheat consumption has increased, on average, by 3 percent a year to an estimated 320 000 tonnes in 2018. This has largely been driven by a growing bread demand. Estimates...
The Decline of South African Sorghum Industry
South African farmers planted 28 800 hectares of sorghum in the 2017/18 production season – the smallest area on record in a dataset starting from 1936/37. This is a disappointing picture, given that sorghum was once seen as key to the development of the biofuel...
South Africa Remains a Net Importer of Oats
I know I shouldn’t be writing about breakfast cereals – oats – on a Friday evening, but I just saw an email enquiring about a piece I wrote in January 2017 and thought it would be good to jot down a few sentences about this crop. Unlike winter wheat production, which...
Some Optimism on South Africa’s 2018/19 Wheat Production
The International Grains Council has just released its monthly update report that placed South Africa’s 2018/19 wheat production at 1.8 million tonnes, up by 6 percent from last month and 20 percent higher than the previous season. This is largely on the back of...
Trade War Trumps Usual Focus on Harvests and Weather
At this time of the year in the agricultural markets, the harvest prospects for the northern hemisphere and weather forecasts for the southern hemisphere are typically discussed, as the 2018-19 planting season is fast approaching for the latter. But this time around...
Honey Caught My Eye Again Today
On August 17, Lusaka Times reported that South Africa has placed a ban on the importation of Zambian honey. This is after South African authorities found honey contaminated with a disease called American Foulbrood in one of the consignments from Zambia. The Zambian...
Wandile Sihlobo is the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and the author of “Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity, and Agriculture.”
Sihlobo is Senior Lecturer Extraordinary at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University.
He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand.
He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Fort Hare and a Master of Science degree in Agricultural Economics from Stellenbosch University.
Sihlobo was appointed as a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Presidential Economic Advisory Council in 2019 after serving on the Presidential Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture between 2018 and 2019.
He is also a member of the Council of Statistics of South Africa (Stats SA) and a Commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission of South Africa (ITAC).
Sihlobo is a columnist for Business Day and Farmers Weekly magazine.