Food: security and affordability
During an Absa business breakfast on food security in Rosebank, Johannesburg on Wednesday, 26 October 2011, it emerged that, while South Africa has enough food to feed its population, the challenge is to make it affordable. The Sowetan reports that Ernst Janovsky, head of Absa agribusiness, said that despite the Eurozone and US economic weakness, global food demand has remained strong.
Food demand, he said, was likely to remain a key factor across all of the world's economies.
Farmers were producing food at a higher rate than that of the population growth, and agricultural growth in Africa was also picking up, with China becoming a strong world food importer, Janovsky said. "It is not about whether there is no food, but can we afford it? If there is profit in producing stock farmers will produce [it]." Janovsky attributed the farmers' ability to produce to the use of new technology, which allows farmers to work more on soil structure and gene modification.
Janovsky said the immediate outlook for South African agriculture was positive, with production levels looking healthy. "We expect that farmers will plant more in the coming year. These efforts will be rewarded, given forecasts of normal to above-normal rainfall," Janovsky said. However, he noted that the beef industry is currently down to a share of 6% to 10% - "we (therefore) expect that the meat supply will not increase in 2012, impacting meat prices." Janovsky said that, with a drop of roughly 35% in slaughtering, the impact on the mutton industry had also been significant. In addition, he said, the number of farmers in the country was expected to decline from 40000 to 14000 by 2050. Janovsky attributed the drop to the government's weak policy in agriculture.
Read the full article on www.sowetanlive.co.za.
