It's difficult to tell South Africa's summer and winter rainfall areas apart at the moment: since November, the rain has barely ceased over the central parts where a significant amount of South Africa's vegetables are grown, close to the province with the highest population density, Gauteng.
When FreshPlaza spoke to Dippenaar at the end of January, the rain had already stripped the vegetable supply on the Tshwane municipal market, and three months on, it has become clear that rain has halved the vegetable yield and affected the grain harvest in this area.
Some farmers will barely take off a crop this summer. One producer told him he had harvested only 200 bags of gem squash off a hectare, says André Dippenaar of DW Fresh, an agency on the Tshwane municipal market. Many of the vegetable suppliers whom he represents farm within a radius of 150 km around the market.
A head of broccoli selling for R45 (2.1 euros) at a Pretoria greengrocer
Before Easter weekend: R260 (12 euros) for 1kg of beetroot
Around Brits in the North West Province, adjacent to Gauteng, farmers could not get into their fields to fertilise, to apply fungicides, or to harvest – their fertile black turf soil around Brits is infamously impossible to work when wet.
"Vegetables hit record prices this summer, and those prices are going to stick around," he says. "That is doubtless going to become your new minimum."
For the past two months, they've been amazed at the peak in beetroot prices in the run-up to Easter. "It got to R180, then 200, then 220, 240… at one point, just before Easter, it reached R260 [12 euros] for a one kilogram bag for the market leaders. Now, it is R20 (0.94 euros)."
Before Easter, carrots were R180 (8.4 euros) for a 1kg bag, now it's R160, which still exceeds historical prices, he says, especially for the period after Easter.
What happened before Easter, he explains, was that everything was scarce and expensive: tomatoes, potatoes, onions, bananas, and it exceeded the purchasing power of consumers whose money ran out.
Moreover, after their deadly floods, which similarly dogged their vegetable production, Botswana had reopened its border to cabbage, beetroot, carrots, and butternut from South Africa, so there were more buyers for pre-Easter stock on the Gauteng municipal markets.
R100 for 10kg veg "a fair price"
Since then, the product is still in short supply, but there's no will to buy it at the previous high prices, which explains the plummeting price of beetroot.
Right: one head of cauliflower for R45 (2.1 euros)
Dippenaar says they expect it will pick up towards the month's end, when school feeding schemes buy in large quantities, but it's become clear that vegetables are no longer cheap. "It's more expensive to farm, and there aren't so many vegetable farmers around anymore. So R100 [4.68 euros] for a 10kg bag of beetroot or potatoes or carrots is what I consider a fair price – it's R10 a kilo. Where else do you buy any food for R10 a kilo?"
And in turn, he explains, farmers around Alldays, Vivo, Tolwe, Dendron, and Tom Burke in Limpopo Province had postponed their planting also as a result of rain, and the result will be intermittent gaps for the foreseeable future.
But on the bright side for them, whereas the market competition from Brits farmers is usually fierce, coupled with higher transport costs for Limpopo farmers, this autumn it is a seller's market for a producer with a crop to sell.
Sweet potatoes from Brits have also fallen victim to the prolonged rains (exports will probably be affected), but Limpopo farmers are coming to the rescue.
Loose cabbages are scarce, and those in bags are noticeably paler because the chewed-up outer leaves have been removed to downplay the impact of the rain, but there's no denying that shelf life will be affected, and therefore there's not a lot of vegetables being taken down to the Cape and KwaZulu-Natal at the moment.
"Water-sensitive products like Hubbard squash or gem squash, baby marrows and baby vegetables – they're all getting spoiled. And right now, we're sitting with the end product from the previous bout of rain, now compounded by more rain, and the cold's not far off. I'm afraid we'll see cold damage like we had last year, with all the moisture in the air."
For more information:
André Dippenaar
DW Fresh
Tel: +27 12 326 9226
Email: [email protected]
http://dwfresh.co.za/