According to industry organisations, an energy crisis is severely impacting South Africa’s food industry, with problems ranging from dairy farms being unable to keep milk chilled to flocks of poultry drowning as ventilators go unattended.
According to the agricultural industry’s trade group AgriSA, record power outages have led to shortages of basic essentials and threatened price increases that could make some popular commodities prohibitively expensive for low-income consumers.
“The affordability of food is going to be a challenge particularly to the lower income household, especially with chicken which is one of the cheapest protein staples in the country,” AgriSA’s chief economist, Kulani Siweya, said.
Load-shedding, or scheduled blackouts, have plagued Africa’s most industrialized economy for years as a result of state-owned energy company Eskom’s inability to keep up with demand and maintain its deteriorating coal power infrastructure.
But during the past 12 months, the outages increased to unprecedented heights.
Herman Du Preez, a poultry farmer, said that at least 40,000 of his birds died last week from asphyxiation as a result of the ventilation system on the farm failing due to power outages.
“It wasn’t a pretty sight to see how much money we lost due to the fact that Eskom is so unreliable,” Du Preez said on Monday at his farm in the North West province.
“The milk industry is also having challenges with processing their milk and the load shedding does impede on their cold storage facilities,” added Siweya of AgriSA.
In a Monday newsletter, president Cyril Ramaphosa said he was aware of the “farmers that are unable to keep their produce fresh” as a result of blackouts.
But he offered no promise of ending the scheduled cuts, anytime soon.
“We must be realistic about our challenges and about what it is going to take to fix them. While we all desperately want to, we cannot end load shedding overnight,” he wrote.
Due to South Africa’s unprecedented power outages, several essentials are in short supply, and price increases are threatening to push some popular goods out of the reach of low-income families’ budgets.
