Highlights in today’s morning note:

• The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an important player in global agricultural trade, ranked the world’s 20th largest importer of agricultural products in 2017. Therefore, last week’s engagement between South Africa and the Kingdom’s Minister of Agriculture is of particular interest, as it focused on key areas that South Africa is already perusing as a way to ignite inclusive growth within the agricultural sector. These are areas of trade, investment, capacity building, research and development in the field of agriculture.
• From a data perspective, although expanded in the third quarter of last year, we expect South Africa’s agricultural economic growth to have contracted by roughly 4%-5% on a quarter-on-quarter seasonally-adjusted annualised rate in the fourth quarter of 2018.
• After registering a notable decline in January 2019, South Africa’s tractor sales could somewhat recover in February.
• South Africa’s weekly grain trade data is due for release on Thursday, 06 March 2019. This will mainly be maize and wheat. In terms of maize, we expect South Africa to be a net exporter in 2018/19 marketing year, with about 2.3 million tonnes (white and yellow maize). Looking ahead, South Africa is likely to remain a net exporter of maize in the 2019/20 marketing year which commences on 01 May 2019. The exports, however, could decline by half from the 2018/19 marketing year to about 1.1 million tonnes

In terms of wheat, we expect a 36% year-on-year decline to 1.4 million tonnes in South Africa’s 2018/19 imports.

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