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Food prices: Enough to drive you nuts

LOTS of muttering and grumbling online about food prices. “They’re ripping us off!” is the universal theme; low-carbers have a particular suspicion about cauliflower prices, it seems, while everyone else is grumbling about potatoes, avocados and nuts, in particular.

So I did a little investigation. I couldn’t get hold of the stats people at the Joburg market, or any veggie growers, so I concentrated on nuts. I spoke to Mia Conradie at Bester Fruit and Nuts, big dealers in pecan nuts, and learnt a few things: South Africa produces very little in the way of pecans compared to the USA, which is far and away the biggest producer in the world.

But it’s been a weird year for weather everywhere, with dear El Niño plus climate change triggering floods and wild storms: “The US had bad weather conditions which damaged a lot of their pecan crops. Therefore, the supply is less, which in turn will spike the price,” explained Conradie.

Our drought has had less of an impact – so far. “The Vaalharts area in the Northern Cape is where the majority of pecan nuts are cultivated [under irrigation]. Pecan trees like a lot of water over a long period of time.” If rain for the rest of the season is poor, water restrictions might affect them, but “The effect of the heat waves is more evident as some of the trees are shedding young nuts to compensate for energy loss. May to August is our harvest season, so then we will see.”

South Africa is a top producer of macadamia nuts, on the other hand, and “KwaZulu-Natal is now in its second year of drought,” says Walter Giuricich, chair of the Southern African Macadamia Growers Association. The top growing regions are Mpumalanga and Limpopo, both of which have also been hit hard by drought this year. “We expect the crop to be down by 10% this year, but that will only be confirmed when harvesting is in full swing.”

I then looked at the Department of Agriculture’s guidelines to see just where major veggies are grown. I know many people tend to think that our veggies come from down south – the broad-stroke urbanite’s picture is: fruit and veg in the Western Cape (where the perception is there’s no drought; of course that’s just not true); pineapples in the Eastern Cape, mielies and sunflowers basically occupying the entire middle of the country, avos and sugar cane in KZN, and paw-paws and bananas in Mpumalanga, with some skinny cows on the fringes of the farming areas.

This is far from the case.

Cauliflower, for one, performs well in the central and eastern Free State, cool Lowveld areas, Gauteng, Mpumalanga Highveld, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, and Limpopo. Cabbage "is grown country-wide, but production is more concentrated in Mpumalanga and the Camperdown and Greytown districts of KwaZulu-Natal."

Fascinating stuff – did you know that carrots are grown around Joburg, in the East Rand and Pretoria? Also Stellenbosch and the Free State. Tomatoes grow in Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Pongola, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, which is ahead of the pack in onions – I remember fields of onions from my Stellenbosch childhood.

So our veggie production is strewn right across the country, and in every area made arid and fragile by drought. No wonder prices are rising dramatically.

But rising costs are not just about weather. Blame the weakening rand for some of it – and demand from other markets.

Says Giuricich, “Imported fertiliser, irrigation equipment and vehicles, for example, for which we pay in dollar-based prices, are pushing up the basic cost of production across all agriculture sectors. Since 2009 China has been buying as much nuts as they can, and that pushes the prices up.

"Farmers are faced with a dilemma – to supply a very lucrative and hungry market, or subsidise the South African supermarket/consumers by supplying at a lower price. It makes so much more business sense to export and earn dollars for their produce.” (Bear in mind that it takes seven to ten years for a pecan or macadamia tree to bear – a long time to wait for return on investment.)

Add in some local conditions – for example, interruptions in electricity supply, forcing many farmers to invest in generators (with an ongoing fuel cost), and to pump from their boreholes more frequently (once again, a cost) and you’re looking at a kind of perfect storm.

“Consumers and supermarkets have to realise that by expecting to pay lower prices extreme pressure is being placed on farmers to produce more, for less,” says Giuricich.

But who should feel that pressure – farmers, or the middleman? Farmers, as Karen Venter, editor of Groente en Vrugte/Fruit and Vegetables, points out, are always “last in the queue” when it comes to pricing – there are a lot of distributors and retailers standing between the farmer and the consumer, each of whom makes a cut off the produce.

“Long supply chains in themselves add costs – logistics, marketing and the profit imperative of many stakeholders,” as Tracy van Heijden wrote in the Mail & Guardian almost exactly three years ago. Who is really making money out of produce – and out of us consumers, asks Venter?

She points to a local supermarket which sells locally-sourced produce of good quality at lower prices. Should the pressure be on the farmer or on the system, the huge and expensive web of cold-chain transport across the country? Food for thought for those who want to complain – or even better, campaign!

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

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