News

Food price pressures that have beset Zimbabwe have persisted, giving the Southern African country the unenviable position of having the world’s worst inflation, despite some slight moderation, a recent report by the World Bank showed.

The UN-brokered deal that has created a protected sea transit corridor for grain exported from Ukraine's three ports on the Black Sea expires later this month.

Advances in gene sequencing are uncovering a wealth of information that will have far-reaching consequences for stable, ongoing food production.

The Land Expropriation Bill will not be used “willy-nilly”, President Cyril Ramaphosa recently said in response to questions in the National Assembly.

Agriculture’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks was highlighted at the Africa Agri Tech conference in Pretoria this week. Billy Petzer, researcher of cyber security systems at the CSIR said, if risks were not mitigated, food supply could be heavily impacted.

The Agbiz/IDC Agribusiness Confidence Index has dropped five points to 44 in the first quarter of 2023, taking it to its lowest level since the second quarter of 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions were first implemented.

The Namibian Meat Board (NMB) recently issued a warning to livestock buyers in Namibia to beware of buying animals from stud breeders who have been deregistered and are no longer allowed to sell their animals as such.

The new EU regulation on deforestation-free supply chains, which comes into effect later this year, has been met with mixed reaction by stakeholders.

The time had come for all role players in the South African grain production sector to re-evaluate their relevance and to co-operate in good faith. This was according to Derek Mathews, who was unanimously re-elected as chairperson of Grain SA (GSA) during the organisation’s 2023 congress.

North West Premier Bushy Maape announced in his recent State of the Province address that a multibillion- rand routine road maintenance plan was to be rolled out in all four districts of the province.

Themba Rikhotso has been appointed as the new CEO of Land Bank, effective from 1 April. He takes over from Khensani Mukhari, who in May last year was appointed as acting CEO, following the resignation of Ayanda Kanana, who served in the position for two years.

Since its reopening in the second half of 2022, the Farmers’ Meat Market export abattoir in Mariental, Namibia, has processed payment of R10,9 m, excluding VAT, to 46 sheep producers in that country.

Efforts to secure global food supplies are being ramped up due to growing concern about climate change. As a result, the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, located on Norway's Spitsbergen Island, recently received its most diverse batch of seed donations yet, according to Reuters.

The decrease in employment in the agriculture sector in the fourth quarter of 2022 (Q4 2022) was cause for serious concern, according to Johan Wege, chair of Agri SA’s Centre of Excellence: Labour.

Rising costs of food and energy, and their impact on food security and the climate, featured widely at this year’s World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland.

The outlook for pome fruit this season is still uncertain, with various factors threatening the financial viability of producers, according to Roelf Pienaar, managing director of Tru-Cape. Pienaar was speaking during a virtual meeting on the forecast for the year ahead.

Zimbabwe’s few remaining commercial farmers who lost their land during that country’s large-scale expropriation of white-owned farms were sceptical about the Zimbabwean government’s recent compensation offer. This was according to Dr Theo de Jager, chairperson of the board at the Southern African Agri Initiative (SAAI).

The shortages of fresh produce currently being experienced in the UK and Ireland can largely be ascribed to extreme weather conditions being experienced in Spain and North Africa, where harvests have been negatively impacted by flooding, snowfall and hail.

The annual budget delivered by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana in Parliament on Wednesday, 22 February, delivered some relief for those farmers struggling under the burden of load-shedding and rising input costs.

The South African stock theft statistics as recently released by the South African Police Service (SAPS) is not a true reflection of the impact of the crime in the country, according to Dr Jane Buys, risk and safety analyst at Free State Agriculture.