Julinda Schroeder

The Polish National Agricultural Support Centre recently hosted Farmer’s Weekly news editor Julinda Schroeder on a four-day study tour to Poland, where she had the opportunity to have a closer look at the country’s poultry industry.

More than 50 000 visitors attended the recent Polagra Food and Polagra Tech International Trade Fair for food and catering products, as well as food technology, held at the Poznań International Fair showgrounds in Poland.

Confusion about the powers and functions of South Africa’s traditional leaders and government ownership of communal land came to the fore at a recent panel discussion between agricultural role players.

EU member states have voted to ban the use of the active ingredient chlorothalonil in fungicides, a move that agricultural industry role players say will leave crops particularly vulnerable to disease.

Heavy rainfall across the Missouri River and Mississippi River basins has ravaged much of the US Midwest this week

We need to connect the land debate in South Africa, specifically in terms of land expropriation without compensation, to how land has been governed and is governed elsewhere in Africa.

The major power players in the world such as the US, the EU, China and India hold very divergent positions with regard to trade from those held by developing nations in Africa and elsewhere, according to Dr John Purchase, CEO of Agbiz.

To date, discussions about land reform have concentrated on political, economic and legal aspects. While these are essential, they will not be enough.

The current land reform process should be placed on hold and a new process started with the goal of preparing a new White Paper on land reform, which would set out new guiding policies and legislation, according to Prof Ben Cousins of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

To contextualise the welfare forgone by South Africans during the past decade in terms of GDP, based on income and jobs lost, it is estimated that the economy would have been R1 trillion bigger if the country did not experience the political dysfunction of the Zuma era, according to Goolam Ballim, chief economist and head of research at the Standard Bank Group.