Beyond the vagaries of the weather and the impact on crops, the year ahead offers a range of promising developments, as well as escalating difficulties if problems aren’t addressed.
Raising of inlet canal wall to Brandvlei Dam is still awaiting the department of water & sanitation approval. The Brandvlei dam is located about 100km from Cape Town as you drive towards Worcester, and is the second-biggest dam in the Western Cape. At present about 26,000ha of fruit and wine grapes are irrigated from the dam, making it a critical resource for the entire district. The dam is unusual in that it is an off-channel dam — it is not built on a river but receives its water through divergence from two small rivers and a feeder canal.
The consolidation has allowed farmers to take advantage of economies of scale as they compete with global players in the agricultural and food markets. For this reason, the misleading statement is often made that the number of SA “farmers” is declining. In fact, it is not necessarily the number of farmers, but the number of farming units, that has been reduced through consolidation. Even so, there are still many small family farms that sustain the food system in rural SA.
The Eastern Cape has agricultural and agro-processing potential but simultaneously a significant challenge of rising poverty and unemployment. This makes a perfect case for policymakers to move with interventions within their reach that would improve the province’s economic conditions.
Efficient logistical systems are a precursor to economic success and should be the focus of policymakers and various industry role players.
With the current fiscal constraints, the rebuilding process will likely have to be led by private sector players as the state has the limited financial muscle to do so. And this is where the challenge begins.
South Africa’s agricultural sector has not, in the recent past, had a season as good as the current one. This is evident from the Agbiz/IDC Agribusiness Confidence Index (ACI), which in the second quarter of this year reached a record high (since its inception in 2001) of 75, from 64 in the first quarter of 2021.
German Agriculture Minister Julia Kloeckner has welcomed the possibility of looser restrictions on genetically engineered crops as an “overdue modernization” of EU policy. She is right – and it is not only Europe that needs to rethink its approach.
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.