Fruit rots as deciduous industry despairs

FRUIT LOST in hot weather and a producer unable to honour a contract to deliver several tons of broccoli without (power-driven) irrigation systems were just two of the grim tales emanating from the Western in the wake of South Africa’s power crisis. As Eskom last week announced its intention to reduce the nation’s power by 10% over the next five months, the Western Cape deciduous fruit industry, South Africa’s largest, voiced grave concerns that ongoing and prolonged outages could have serious consequences for both export and domestic markets. “Ongoing power cuts will make the cost of doing business more expensive as capital equipment, like generators, is not cheap,” said Stuart Symington, CEO of the Fresh Produce Exporters’ Forum. “The knock-on effect of this is that we will become less competitive in the market and chase away foreign direct investment.” What most concerns Stefan Conradie, manager of the pome and stone fruit division at the Deciduous Fruit Trust, is the potential impact of loss in foreign and local investor confidence in the deciduous industry. “The power crisis has definitely impacted on agriculture in the Western Cape. We represent the growers and anything that affects the production side will impact in a major way on one’s available supply and continuity of supply and that could lead to programmes being lost.” Conradie says were outages to start occurring on a daily basis, it would become a “major issue” for the deciduous sector. The major co-operative packhouses have their own power supply sources, as have major exporting companies like Tru- Cape, whose two major shareholders, Two-a-Day and Ceres Fruit Growers, decided in favour of backup generators last year. Even though Western Cape companies are doing brisk business in generator sales, fact is the cost of these is beyond the means of many farmers. Eskom has apparently undertaken to cut farm power only at certain times on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The effect will be that water cannot be pumped from boreholes to dams and that packhouse cold rooms will become ineffective with prolonged outages.