The agriculture sector has decried the poor state of South Africa’s deteriorating road infrastructure that costs the industry millions of rand in turnover losses.
Lobby group AgriSA commissioned a study that found that participating farmers rely on road transportation to move an average of 94% of their produce. On average, participants transported about R7.1-billion in agricultural produce by road in the last financial year.
AgriSA agricultural economist Kulani Siweya said the entity will share the results of its survey with the Presidency and its Investment and Infrastructure Office, and called on the government to join its efforts to address some of the infrastructure issues the sector faces.
According to Siweya “13% of respondents relied on road transport weekly, while more than 87% relied on roads daily. This explains why 69% of them had at some point tried to fix affected roads themselves.”
Siweya said the respondents on average incurred to repair and other related costs of more the R200,000 per participant, which is untenable for small-scale farmers. “All this constrains the potential of the sector to contribute to South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employment. The sector already contributes R128-billion to GDP, but this can be even higher.”
According to Statistics South Africa figures, the sector registered R370,7-billion in income in 2020 compared with R356,8-billion in 2019.
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