Four of South Africa's five winter crops are on course for bigger harvests this year. The fifth is wheat, the grain the country's mills depend on, and it is heading for its smallest crop in eight years.
That reading comes from Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber (Agbiz), working from the Crop Estimates Committee's second estimate of the season, published on 29 September. The committee puts the crop at 1.81 million tonnes, 5% down on last year, and the eight-year comparison is Sihlobo's own. It is only the second of ten estimates, so the number can still move, and it already has: the committee's first go, in August, was lower, at 1.76 million tonnes.
Why wheat shrank while barley grew
Two things did it. Farmers planted less wheat to begin with, about 479,500 hectares, the smallest area in 13 years by the committee's earlier count, and most of the cut came in the Western Cape, which grows around two-thirds of the country's wheat. Then the province stayed dry: in the Swartland, home to about a fifth of South Africa's wheat, Grain SA counted 79% less rain than the ten-year average between June and August.
Planting less was not a whim. The season began a few months after the US-Iran war broke out, with fertiliser and fuel prices surging, and fertiliser alone is around 35% of a typical wheat farmer's input costs.
Everything else got more ground. Farmers still planted 851,510 hectares of winter crops in total, a touch more than last year, and barley and canola are each heading for a fifth more than last season, with oats up by more than a quarter. That is why the whole winter crop still comes in 2% higher, at 2.67 million tonnes, even as wheat goes the other way.
Filling the gap from abroad
The shortfall gets bought in, as it does every year. South Africa uses roughly 3.4 to 3.8 million tonnes of wheat a year, far beyond what its own farmers grow, and Sihlobo expects imports to rise to around 2 million tonnes this season, more than last season. Last season's grain came from a long list of suppliers, led by Poland, Russia and Lithuania, according to the South African Grain Information Service.
Sihlobo does not expect finding it to be the hard part. The International Grains Council puts this season's world harvest at 820 million tonnes, comfortably above the long-run norm of about 790 million, and he calls the global market well supplied. Price is the open risk: he names shipping disruption in Ukraine as the main near-term pressure, and says prices should settle if tensions in the region ease.
