A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
A region that cannot certify a food technologist's qualifications across its own borders will struggle to build the agro-processing capacity its farmers actually need. That is the practical contradiction behind SADC's skills agenda for the agrifood sector:...
A regional bloc that names disaster risk management as a standing strategy is quietly admitting that its agricultural sector already lives with recurring climate shocks. That admission is the more useful starting point for reading SADC's consolidated...
Southern Africa grows food across sixteen distinct agro-ecological zones and trades comparatively little of it across its own borders. That is the standing contradiction the 41st SADC Summit, held in Lilongwe on 17 and 18 August 2021, walked into without resolving...
One man’s meat is another men’s poison. This phrase came so close to its literal meaning in the donkey business recently established in Africa. While many are grossed out by just the thought of eating donkey meat, some consider it a delicacy. This phenomenon only...
Displacement, not drought, is the immediate threat to farm output in northern Mozambique. The insurgency in Cabo Delgado has pushed people off land they would otherwise be planting and harvesting, and the extraordinary summit SADC heads of state held in Maputo on 23...
Agro-processing is one of only three value chains SADC has named as a priority under its restated push to raise manufactured exports to 50 percent of the bloc's total exports by 2030, from under 20 percent today. That is a meaningful distinction for farmers and...
Agriculture employs more people across SADC than any other sector and absorbs more of the region's climate risk than any other sector too — drought cuts maize yields, erratic rainfall disrupts planting calendars, and heat stress affects livestock and horticulture...
The seed industry in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region is among the best performing agricultural sub-sectors in some member states comprising 21 countries. An extract from a report titled “A Regional Perspective on the Development of...
SADC has just adopted a ten-year regional strategy that will shape food systems across sixteen member states, and agriculture does not appear as one of its five named headline pillars. For a farming and food-systems readership, that omission is not a signal that...