A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

VII

THE

GRAIN AND OILSEED INDUSTRY

OF SOUTH AFRICA – A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

with the establishment of co-operatives to try and promote mutual co-operation,

and ultimately with full-scale statutory control from the 1930s.

The various agricultural industries were controlled by statutory control boards

without decision-making powers that reported to the Minister of Agriculture,

which meant that the government actually exercised total control over the agri-

cultural environment. True, the producers had the majority vote on the control

boards, but ultimately these boards could not make binding decisions and could

only make recommendations to the Minister of Agriculture.

During the second period, from 1996, a completely opposite dispensation applied,

with a free market without a control system or marketing schemes and a Marketing

Act that has specific prescriptions with which the government has to comply if it

wants to introduce any control measures with respect to agricultural marketing.

The ‘transition period’ lasted from roughly 1987 to 1996. This book makes sev-

eral references to the events during the transition period that exerted pressure on

the controlled system, and that ultimately led to the Marketing Act of 1996 and

the deregulation of agricultural marketing. This transition period coincided with

the changes in the political environment in South Africa, which also led to a totally

new political dispensation in the country after the 1994 elections. This drastically

changed the entire social and business landscape of South Africa.

INDIVIDUAL YEARS

Agricultural conditions change from one season to the next (whether with respect

to climate, rainfall, yield, prices, global markets, supply and demand, to mention

a few), and each season has its own characteristics, challenges and results. The

history in this book is recorded against that background and general knowledge.

Consequently, specific problems experienced in each year are not discussed in

detail, but an attempt is made to rather render the general, broad course of his-

tory, except for a number of really exceptional conditions or events, like the record

maize crop of 1981 and the devastating drought barely three seasons later, or the

drought of 1992, which served as backdrop for the introduction of various meas-

ures and directional changes.

TECHNICAL ASPECTS

In order to try and eliminate confusion and unnecessary detail, references

to some names and concepts have been standardised as follows:

•

Department of Agriculture

is used to refer to all the relevant state de-

partments that were responsible for agriculture through the years, re-

gardless of the actual names as amended from time to time.

• The same applies to references to the

Minister of Agriculture

• In some cases the control boards also differed in specific periods, par-

ticularly in the initial years. Their names are also standardised to for ex-

ample the

Maize Board, the Wheat Board, the Oil Seeds Board and the

Sorghum Board

. For the sake of technical correctness, the first reference

to such a board will use its full name at the time, but subsequently only the

generic or abridged name will be used.

DAVID THERON

Author