This morning’s blog post is co-authored with fellow agricultural economist, Tinashe Kapuya

Some analysts, myself included, did not anticipate that the 2019/20 harvest and agricultural performance would be as robust as we have witnessed.

My aim in this morning’s blog post is to discuss briefly the sentiment conditions in South Africa’s agriculture and agribusiness sectors. This follows the release of the third-quarter results of the Agbiz/IDC Agribusiness Confidence Index (ACI). For full disclosure, I lead the compilation of this Index.

Over the past few days, we have reflected on 2020/21 global grain and oilseed production estimates from the International Grain Council (IGC).

In this blog post, I will briefly reflect on South Africa’s recent weekly grain data releases and also on the upcoming 2020/21 production season, leaning on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) data that was published on Friday evening.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa is facing increased pressure to accelerate reforms of the power and telecoms sectors in the continent’s most industrialised economy after the pandemic erased more than a decade of fragile growth.