MORNING NOTE: Taking stock of recent domestic and global grains monthly data
My aim in this morning’s blog post is to provide an update of South Africa’s grain trade data for the week of 18 September 2020. I will also share highlights from the International Grain Council monthly global grains update report. SA grain trade data South Africa...
Grains boom?
The global grains environment has changed somewhat from the optimistic picture of a few weeks ago. The increased dryness in parts of Europe and the US is weighing on global crop production, specifically maize and wheat, and this has raised the prospects for downward...
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...
Benefits of farm productivity
Nowadays we take for granted how the world agricultural productivity has improved over the past couple of decades. Today’s farms produce more maize, wheat, soybeans, etc. per hectare than any other time in history. This has been made possible by, amongst other...
A mixed bag of grains
We had important data out overnight – the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, produced by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The commodities I typically pay close attention to in this report are wheat, maize and soybeans, for...
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.