Farmers are calling for urgent action to prevent soaring food prices and potential shortages as a result of the ongoing electricity blackouts that have increased the cost of production of basic necessities.
Agri SA, a federation of agricultural food producers across the country, raised the alarm on Wednesday amid the ongoing rolling blackouts brought by load-shedding that consumers will be the hardest hit should the crisis persist.
Agri SA executive director Christo van der Rheede has warned that should load-shedding surpass stage 6 and escalate to stage 7 or 8, there will be no fresh produce on the shelves.
For the past three weeks, Eskom has been implementing load-shedding ranging from stage 4 to stage 6, which has had a devastating impact on businesses and ordinary South Africans.
Van der Rheede said load-shedding had pushed up the price of farming with little to no reward for the sector.
“Load-shedding has made things even more difficult for farmers because they're losing out on irrigation quotas, machinery breaks due to load-shedding and also there's the cost of extra labour expense because of availability of electricity. Workers can't do the work during the day because of lack of availability of electricity and have to work at night,” he said.
“At this point, we face a couple of risks. If we have another round of stage 6 it's really going to lead to food shortages because farmers are dependent on cold-chain storage facilities. How we export fruit, Europeans have imposed stringent requirements on SA citrus which makes it even more critical for SA to export.
“Irrigation is run using electricity and if a farmer plants cabbages and those cabbages go without water for a day, you lose that crop and there's no way to replace it. This leads to food shortages which will push up the price of food.”
The National Planning Commission on Wednesday proposed urgent measures that it said would end the current load-shedding crisis. These include ensuring new generation capacity was rapidly and urgently brought onto the grid, together with significant new storage capacity.
“Evidence suggests it is possible to do this within 24 months if 10,000MW of new generation capacity is rapidly constructed and commissioned as well as 5,000MW of storage capacity. Solar and wind power projects can be built rapidly within two to three years,” the commission said in a statement.
It proposed that there must be a temporary exemption from local content requirements for construction and commissioning of new generation and storage capacity due to come online in the next 36 months.
It will be important to ensure that finance is mobilised for short and longer-term investments in new energy generation and storage capacity. Food and fuel prices have skyrocketed in the country owing to the effects of war in Ukraine, leaving consumers buckling under the high cost of living.
Van der Rheede said the agri-sector had showed how flexible it was by finding new markets.
“This was a significant step for us because things weren't looking good but we succeeded in finding new markets and were able to import from other countries. Our farmers also have started to plant wheat.”
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