The water situation looks better in the Boland and Cape Town but alas, that doesn’t tell the full story of the Western Cape: the Klein-Karoo has barely had rain or snow this winter and the dam levels are shocking: two important irrigation dams, the Kammanassie Dam and the Stompdrift Dam are 8% and 2% full [...]
Harbour personnel are cautiously optimistic that the situation will start improving at Ngqura Port Terminal (NPT), but it will take two weeks, at the least, to get back on schedule. Staffing shortages and low productivity at all of the country’s containers terminals mean that Transnet Port Terminals (TPT) will have to work around the clock [...]
Usually the situation at Durban Harbour is the citrus industry’s greatest cause for concern but this season the situation at the Port Elizabeth container terminal (PECT) and the new Ngqura (Coega) container terminal (NCT) is “absolute chaos” and “a major crisis”, according to various citrus exporters, affecting fruit exports from the region. Exports are happening [...]
In a recent customer advisory, MSC said that cargo from Durban and from Ngqura to Europe would be loaded as usual on ships of its South Africa-Europe service, but that the vessels would skip their normal Cape Town call to make up for lost time. Connections from Cape Town to Europe will be maintained by [...]
In June this year, in a ceremony at Letsitele - in the Limpopo province of South Africa - BioBee South Africa, together with its shareholders: BioBee Sde Eliyahu, ZZ2 and Hishtil SA inaugurated a new production facility. During the ceremony, Ran Gan-El, BioBee Sde Eliyahu’s CEO announced that these new state of the art facilities [...]
The soft citrus season is busy catching up on an initial slow start due to delayed colouring in many areas. With some southern regions earlier and the northern regions later, there may be a clash in the timing of late mandarins. In the far and central north of the country harvesting is underway of late [...]
During the first week of June, the first ship with new season citrus from South Africa arrived in the port of Rotterdam. The 'Crown Garnet' docked at the port of the Rotterdam Merwehaven, which was full of cooling houses for the storage and overhaul of fruit prior to 2009. This part of the port was [...]
The Baltic Summer reefer vessel carrying citrus from South Africa to the People’s Republic of China had arrived at Shanghai Port on 10 June 2019. The historic shipment of 5200 tons of citrus in a breakbulk vessel was launched on 6 May 2019 at Maydon Wharf Port in Durban. The reefer vessel was cleared upon [...]
The new LemonGold® brand, which follows in the footsteps of the globally successful ClemenGold mandarin brand, will launch in one of South Africa’s high-end retailers in June. Although seedless lemons are not new to the local or international agricultural market, previous South African consumer-facing offerings have not been backed by strong branding. Now consumers will [...]
For the first season ever, Cape citrus growers can have their fruit destined for Japan inspected and loaded in their own provinces. Starting last week, citrus for Japan was inspected at Cape Fruit Coolers close to Cape Town (right: Remember Dzombe, DAFF chief agricultural food and quarantine technician at the Cape Town office) and from [...]
