South Africa’s farm economy to recover in 2020
South Africa’s farming economy was not in good shape in 2019. This is clear from the agricultural GDP data released this morning by Statistics South Africa. The data show a 6.9% year-on-year contraction for 2019, which is a second consecutive year of contraction in...
Good year for SA grain sector
This promises to be a good year for South Africa’s grain sector, at least from a production front. The data released yesterday by the Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) show that South Africa’s 2019/20 summer grains production could increase by 26% y/y to 16.8 million...
Delayed rains, but SA’s 2019/20 summer crop looks promising
South Africa’s Crop Estimates Committee releases its first estimate of the country’s 2019/20 summer crop harvest today. Market expectations are largely positive because of two factors. First, the area planted for major summer crops such as maize, soybeans and...
This is how President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech affects agriculture
Written for and first published on Business Day on 18 February 2020 CAPE TOWN – My agricultural take on President Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) can be segmented into three areas. Firstly, the President reaffirmed the government’s commitment to...
GM maize: less work for her, and more maize for him
One of the research papers I read this weekend was by agriculture economists, Marnus Gouse, Debdatta Sengupta, Patricia Zambrano, and José Falck Zepeda published in World Development, a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal, in July 2016. It assesses whether men and...
The good of GM seeds
Society still argues about the use of genetically modified (GM) crops. But two lessons are beyond the debate. Firstly, the GM crops have contributed to an increase in yields in countries that have adopted the seeds, notably the United States, Brazil and Argentina,...
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“.
He is a Senior Lecturer Extraordinary at the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand.
Sihlobo was appointed as a member of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Presidential Economic Advisory Council in 2019 (and re-appointed in 2022), having served on the Presidential Expert Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture from 2018.
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, The Herald and Farmers Weekly magazine.
His weekly podcast, “Agricultural Market Viewpoint with Wandile Sihlobo“, is available on all podcast platforms.
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.