South Africa’s wheat harvest deliveries to commercial silos on track – Sagis

The South African Grain Information System (Sagis) has reported yesterday that more than 2.06 million tonnes of wheat has already been delivered to commercial silos by week 18 of the 2021/22 production season.

In its weekly producer deliveries released on Wednesday, the information service’s data showed that this amount of wheat equated to more than 93 percent of the revised estimate of 2.21 million tonnes.

Last week, the Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) released its sixth production forecast for 2021/22 winter crops. There were notable changes from the previous update of the end of December 2021, with wheat production forecast up by 3 percent to 2.21 million tonnes, which is the largest expected wheat crop produced since 2002, when it was 2.43 million tonnes.

Agricultural Business Chamber chief economist Wandile Sihlobo said while this was the largest harvest since 2002, South Africa would remain the importer of wheat.

“The import requirements for the 2021/22 marketing year, which started in October, was 1.53 million tonnes. This is up by 1 percent from the 2020/21 marketing year because of a marginal increase in domestic consumption,” Sihlobo said.

Agbiz said the Western Cape, the region that grows more than two-thirds of South Africa’s winter crops, received favourable rainfall since the start of the 2021/22 season, which then boosted the yields and encouraged farmers to lift the area plantings for wheat and canola. This increase in the Western Cape’s wheat production overshadowed the annual decline in the Northern Cape, Free State, and the Eastern Cape. The other province that registered a yearly uptick in production is Limpopo and Gauteng. Still, there were reports of relatively poor quality in some regions of the country because of the heavy rains during the harvest period.

While South Africa was traditionally a net exporter of agricultural products, wheat was the second most valuable imported food product after rice. In 2020, South Africa’s wheat imports were valued at $493 million (R7 571), which equated to 8 percent of the overall agricultural import value of $5.9 billion that year.

In the first half of 2021, wheat had not moved from its second place as a valuable imported agricultural into South Africa. Over the past decade, imports accounted for an average of 53 percent of South Africa’s annual wheat consumption of 3.2 million tonnes. As a result of this dependency on the global market, the country paid close attention to primary producers, who serve as South African suppliers. These include the Black Sea countries, Canada, Australia, the US and the EU.

TLU SA said it was concerned about the condition of the country’s roads which already had and will continue having a greater impact on the economy. This was a result of several factors that included the recent heavy rains in recent weeks and the accompanying floods that had damaged roads. However, it said that many roads were already in a poor state before the heavy rains and floods.

The organisation said both dirt and gravel roads were referred to as roads that needed urgent attention, because due to the lack of regular maintenance, the condition of the roads were now so bad that they needed to be rebuilt.

Drickus Botha, TLU SA Regional Manager: North, said the country was past the stage where maintenance was still a possible solution.

“In Limpopo, we recently had to sacrifice a leader farmer and food producer to death due to the dire and dangerous condition of the R522 between Vivo and Louis Trichardt.

“Gillie Fick was well-known in the cattle farming industry and tragically died on Friday due to a pothole in a road littered with potholes. Gert Fourie also recently died in a car accident on the same road. There are often serious accidents on the road with too many deaths,” Botha said.

The organisation said the situation was the same everywhere in South Africa, as farmers were told that there was no money, no manpower and no machinery.

“Farming input costs are already very high, and this is even before today’s fuel price increase is taken into account. We simply cannot afford another onslaught – like the national road conditions – in our effort to provide quality food to the people at affordable prices.

“The government must now come to the table and at all levels pay attention to the deterioration of our roads, because it is already a crisis,” Botha said.

 

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