As Shukela Plus delves into the innovation and diversification options available to South Africa’s sugar industry, Tongaat Hulett’s Managing Director: Sugar Operations, Simon Harvey responds to questions on the development of the Sugar Industry Masterplan, how it will...

Profit from South Africa’s booming macadamia industry offers massive benefits for rural areas and communities as well as a more than viable alternative for the country’s embattled sugar growers. As one of the world’s most lucrative crops, macadamias are not only an...

Durban, 13th July 2020: Tongaat Hulett Sugar is actively partnering with 13 restitution communities overseeing 6 000 hectares across South Africa and has allocated hundreds of thousands of rands to promote sustainable land reform, support local communities and help...

TONGAAT Hulett has welcomed a decision by the Competition Tribunal to approve without conditions the acquisition of Tongaat Hulett Starch by the KLL Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barloworld. The decision by the South African Competition Tribunal is the third...

Award-winning agricultural journalist Lindi Botha says as South African farmers neglect to inform the narrative on agricultural best practice in the country, the sector is at risk of continuing to attract uninformed criticism, resulting in bad press, as consumers and...

Achieving a 90-day turnaround for the water-use licence application (WULA) process will be a welcome step for the struggling economy, according to SRK Consulting principal scientist Jacky Burke. Changes will be necessary, though, before the regional and national...

24 June 2020 "The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the urgent need to address bottlenecks in smallholder farming communities and cultivate the vast amounts of underutilised land across the country." This was the clear message of both Professor Ferdi Meyer, Managing...

Publication date: Wed 24 Jun 2020 In his State of the Nation Address on 23 February 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa made a declaration that water use licenses should be finalised within 90 days, with effect from 01 April 2020. Since this declaration, the Department of...

Good news for consumers but not for farmers as South Africa’s avocado industry re-routes two million extra cartons of the fruit on to the domestic market as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic on export predictions. For those who love smashed avocado on toast, or...

As South Africa’s cane farmers buckle under the pressure of the government’s Health Promotion Levy, record low world sugar prices and a flood of imports from Eswatini, SA Canegrowers Vice Chairman Dipuo Ntuli is calling for a longer view, saying scores of vulnerable...

As major airlines across the world, as well as in South Africa, file for business rescue as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns in major tourist and business destinations, South Africa’s sugar industry is left wondering about what...

Missed opportunities and unfulfilled promises by the government for more than a decade on biofuel and cogenerated energy plans have not only cost South Africans dearly but failed the country’s sugar industry. The much-vaunted Sugar Industry Master Plan now has a...

29 MAY 2020  We are all living through something the severity of which we have never experienced before and are currently in the 64th day of lockdown. There have, of course, been pandemics before. The plague or Black Death of the mid-1300s resulted in between 75 and...

01 June 2020 According to AgriSA's Omri van Zyl  “We’re talking about food security and social stability. There’s a lot of stu that coincides with this.” The Land Bank, which has equity of R5bn and liabilities of about R45bn, defaulted on some of its debt last month,...

01 June 2020 South Africa’s agricultural sector, which is export-orientated, is one of the sectors we had feared would be disrupted by the pandemic. So far, however, there has been minimal disruptions as the agricultural and food sector had been generally operational...

25/05/2020 In terms of economic growth, the blueberry industry has significantly outperformed other fruit industries, increasing its value exponentially for a decade, doubling its growth as an industry in recent years and doubling its economic income in the last year...

“Back in the day the exchange rate was R2 to the US dollar” The rand tends to weaken over time and to understand this phenomenon, it is important to look at some of the basic drivers of exchange rates over time. For ease of reference we stick to the rand against the...

21 May 2020  A combination of favourable crude oil price outlook, lower local inflation with risks to the downside, and economic contraction afforded the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) room to cut the repurchase rate by another 50 basis points. This brought the...

Commercial sugarcane farmer Tim Murray has a family tree rich with mathematicians, engineers and a Scottish provost, to boot, and since the 2019 South African Sugar Technologists’ Conference, he can add to the list his achievement as an award-winning farmer who has...

4/15/2020 In a time when there seems to be little good news in agriculture, hemp is offering hope for Leigh Barry. While the Minnesota grower’s vision for growing hemp on his traditional corn, soybean, and alfalfa operation began about three years ago, 2019 marked his...

IN LATE APRIL, PRODUCTION RAN AT AN ANNUALIZED RATE OF 8.2 BILLION GALLONS, LESS THAN HALF OF ITS PACE IN FEBRUARY, BEFORE THE CORONAVIRUS BECAME PANDEMIC. Ethanol production fell to record lows during April due to the coronavirus but is showing modest signs of...

The Netherlands: Good avocado sales; shortage of larger sizes expected in the short term The coronavirus crisis seems to be driving up the demand for avocados. A Dutch importer says that avocados are among the most sought-after categories, together with citrus and...

The demand on the European market is high, while volumes are lower than last year. The fact that the demand has increased has everything to do with the coronavirus crisis, because the fruit is a great source of vitamin C. Argentina and South Africa, the two countries...

A growing number of countries in Africa are looking to cannabis as the ticket out of poverty, and foreign investment for this sector has flooded in. Activists who pushed for legal commercial cultivation now face the challenge of crafting a cannabis economy that...