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Another year of uneven growth in South Africa’s agriculture
We will say a bit more about South Africa’s agricultural performance in our letter tomorrow morning. Still, we do want to comment on the sector's overall performance for the year and where we see it going forward.
South Africa’s agriculture will likely continue to maintain encouraging growth figures throughout the year. Strong horticulture (fruit, wine, and vegetables) and field crop production, along with solid poultry production conditions, will be the key drivers.
Still, the cattle industry (beef and dairy) and pork producers will be under strain because of animal disease.
Therefore, the broader growth figures hide some challenges in the sector. The El Niño and higher input costs shocks will only affect the sector’s performance in 2027.
Remember, these will only start to matter in the new season crop, the 2026-27 crop, which, in the case of field crops, is only planted from October 2027 and matters more going into 2027.
While this environment will be challenging in the 2026-27 season, we remain convinced that the resilient South African farmers will continue to power through with their production operations.
And yes, we will gain more insight into what the season will look like in the coming months. But we think the fears that large areas of land may be unplanted are too far from what we have observed in history. Farmers are financially strained, but they will likely continue with their activities.
For 2026, when we see the solid growth numbers, as we did in the first quarter of 2026, where the sector’s gross value added expanded by 3.9% quarter-on-quarter (seasonally adjusted), from a 0.4% in the last quarter of 2025, let us remember that these mask the challenges in the cattle and pig industries.
The sector had a better start to the year, but not all is well. We are in a year of uneven growth in South Africa’s agriculture.
--Wandile Sihlobo is the Presidential Envoy on Agriculture and Land. He is also the chief economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, and a senior research fellow in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Stellenbosch University.
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