A large upper-management delegation from the National Department of Agriculture (DoA) has assured South Africa’s beleaguered milk production sector that the department will work closely with it in future to guarantee the sustainability of the country’s milk supply.
The recent meeting between the DoA delegation and the Milk Producers’ Organisation (MPO) at Cedara in KwaZulu-Natal was part of a series of food security workshops that the DoA is holding around the country with various agricultural commodity producer groups. Through these workshops, government intends to find ways to assist these producer groups to overcome challenges that affect their sustainability and the food security of South Africans. Speakers included the MPO’s chairperson Nelius van Greunen and MD Etienne Terre’Blanche, Thutukani Hlangu, a research technician from the Agricultural Research Council’s milk recording section, and the of the Dairy Standard Agency of SA, Ina Jordaan.
Their comments gave the DoA delegation an insight into the importance of a sustainable and productive milk production sector in the country. “Our dairy farmer numbers have been declining dramatically since the industry was deregulated. While each remaining farmer is producing more milk than 10 years ago, the threats of higher input costs, lower financial returns, and legal and illegal dairy imports are all putting pressure on these farmers. The dairy farming environment in this country is not attractive to desperately needed new entrants,”
Van Greunen pointed out. he MPO chairperson added that the current narrow base of milk buying, processing and retail outlets in SA was also creating a bottleneck in the milk value chain that hindered free-market principles and took away dairy farmers’ ownership of their product. erre’Blanche pointed out to the DoA delegation that the MPO was urgently seeking ways to level the playing field for all stakeholders along the milk value chain. This was to ensure that dairy farmers could remain productive, while at the same time encouraging new black entrants to develop the local milk production industry. ”For a long time now the MPO has had to implement its own measures to try and protect the sustainability of the country’s dairy farmers,” said Terre’Blanche. “While we have had successes in training existing and future farmers, empowering new black farmers, and providing our members with the latest information relevant to the industry, it is only with government’s concerted help that we can fully secure the future of our valuable industry.” Trevor Dugmore, a dairy nutrition expert from the KZN Department of Agriculture and Environmental Affairs, along with Hlangu and Jordaan, also introduced the DoA delegation to the more technical aspects of dairy production in SA, highlighting the equal importance to the dairy industry of both legislative and technical support from government. he DoA’s director-general Masiphula Mbongwa said that his department had been given a mandate to increase SA’s milk production by 10% to 15% within the next two years and to promote the country’s exports by the same percentage. He said further workshops should be held with the milk production industry to produce concrete and implementable strategies to secure and grow the industry’s future.
In conclusion Terre’Blanche suggested that one way forward was for dairy producers to form cooperatives similar to those that existed before deregulation. “This might also be a suitable way for emerging dairy farmers to pool their resources and take back ownership of their product [from international companies],” the MPO managing director explained. – Lloyd Phillips
