Namibia shouldn’t restrict maize imports during a pandemic
Since the pandemic started several countries have adopted restrictive trade policy approaches such as export bans and export quotas. The justification for such policies was consumer-focused, as the countries needed to ensure domestic food security during this...
How long can the status quo in the global food system hold?
Essay by Wandile Sihlobo and Tinashe Kapuya[i] As countries continue to implement “risk-adjusted” responses to COVID-19 and global leaders and analysts alike continue to assess the evolving implications of the pandemic on global markets. What makes COVID-19 unique is...
The global wheat market is not out of the woods yet
The global wheat market is not out of the woods. While the recent data from United States Department of Agriculture and the International Grains Council brought some comfort indicating prospects of a record wheat harvest in 2020/21, estimated at 768 million tonnes, a...
Higher seasonal output will not sustain sales of agricultural machinery
This essay first appeared on Business Day, May 12, 2020 No industry will escape the economic pain of the Covid-19 pandemic. The high-frequency economic data for industries that are classified as non-essential during the lockdown period already shows the negative...
Positive prospects for the 2020/21 global grains harvest
This week, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates data – arguably among the most anticipated data releases in global agricultural markets. The agency reinforced the message painted by the...
Breaking new ground in global agriculture post-Covid
This essay first appeared on the Financial Mail, May 7, 2020 As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, governments have intensified efforts to contain the pandemic by limiting the movement of people and temporarily shutting down parts of the economy....
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.