Agriculture sector concerned about fuel price hike impact on the value chain

Agri Western Cape CEO, Jannie Strydom, says the price increase of diesel and fuel will hit the agriculture sector hard.

The Western Cape is a major agricultural province in South Africa. With planting season nearing its end, producers will have to absorb the current fuel and diesel increases.

Strydom says there is concern over the impact this major fuel increase will have down the value chain.

“We need also to have a look at the increase in diesel and fuel price in conjunction and the close to doubling of fertiliser and chemical price increases. A further risk is that producers need to do their budgets before hand and apply for OPEX and if we find or see these increases and input costs, producers then throughout and within the season need to obtain addition OPEX and that might be a problem for some of our producers to obtain some of this addition funds or capital to accommodate the increase in input costs,” says Strydom.

SA Petroleum Industry Association on soaring fuel prices: Avhapfani Tshifularo [31 May 2022]

Government’s intervention in fuel price hike is very limited: Economist 

Chief Economist at Old Mutual, Johan Els says government’s intervention to limit the impact of rising prices on consumers is very limited.

Food and fuel prices have been rising steadily as a result of supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19 lockdowns in China and the impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict on the price of Brent crude oil and other commodities.

The latest petrol adjustments announced by the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy have pushed the price of fuel to more than R25 litre.

Els says consumers will have to cut down on spending.

“There’s a lot of potential negatives around from the petrol price, food prices, overall inflation interest rate increases and lots of uncertainty. But we have to take into account if we’re talking about pricing first. We want to be a market based economy,” adds Els.

“We are a market based economy and we have to realise that government cannot always control pricing, that’s very important. So with these price measures that we see, we as consumers [should] adjust our spending patterns. So if we forced to spend more on fuel and transport, we spend less elsewhere.”

Taxi industry in KZN calls on government to intervene on the fuel price hikes [1 June 2022] 

Meanwhile, the taxi industry in KwaZulu-Natal has called on government to intervene on the fuel price hikes in order to save jobs.

The South African National Taxi Council (Santaco) says if nothing is done to cushion the industry, South Africans must brace themselves for more job losses.

The multi-billion rand sector is responsible for transporting millions of South Africans daily.