MORNING NOTE: What to make of South Africa’s weekly grain trade and producer deliveries data?
Aside from various data publications that I wrote about last week, we also had two important releases in the South African agricultural market that I didn’t get to explore. Therefore, I will start this week by focusing on these data, namely (1) the weekly grain...
WEEKEND NOTE: Outlook looks bright for South Africa’s agriculture sector
SA’s agricultural sector had a solid start to 2020, with first-quarter gross value-added growing 27.8% quarter on quarter on a seasonally adjusted and annualised basis (see Exhibit 1). I noted then that the succeeding quarters would be likely to continue to show...
MORNING NOTE: SA set to have the largest wheat harvest in a decade, and largest canola and barley harvest on record
We now have further evidence that the good rains that the Western Cape received over the past couple of months will have a meaningful contribution to South Africa’s 2020/21 winter crop production. The data released by the Crop Estimates Committee on August 27 shows...
MORNING NOTE: Brief reflections on South Africa’s food price inflation
South Africa’s food price inflation accelerated to 4.6% y/y in July 2020, from 4.5% y/y in the previous month. This was primarily underpinned by a slight uptick in bread and cereals; fish; and oils and fats. With the current higher maize prices, which yesterday...
MORNING NOTE: Some positive news for South Africa’s beef industry
South Africa’s beef industry has maintained a trade surplus since 2014 (see Exhibit 1). The key markets included China, Lesotho, Mozambique, Eswatini, Angola, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Kuwait in the case of frozen beef. While in terms of fresh beef, Kuwait, UAE,...
MORNING NOTE: Assessing risks to South Africa’s food price inflation
At this time of the year, the focus in the South African agricultural market would ordinarily be shifting towards the next summer crop season, which begins with the planting of grains and oilseeds around October of each year. But it is proving hard to solely follow...
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.