Pretoria | Thursday
THE Department of Agriculture’s Crop Estimates Committee (CEC) on Wednesday unveiled a new advanced information system for crop forecasting.
Lauded as state-of-the-art, the R3,5-million system is expected to improve the accuracy of crop estimation.
”Timely, accurate, unbiased and reliable crop statistics supplied by CEC are important to prevent the spreading of rumours aimed at market manipulation and unfair price-influencing,” said CEC chairman Rodney Dredge during the launch in Pretoria.
The CEC comprises representatives from the national and provincial departments of agriculture, the Agricultural Research Council, Stats SA and the National Agricultural Marketing Council.
Dredge said the system was to a large extent based on similar systems used in other free market economies.
”This system is of crucial importance to producers because they need crop estimates to base decisions upon, especially in the free market where demand and supply mainly determine prices.”
Other benefits to the producer are that crop statistics would ensure more equal bargaining power between the buyer and the seller; planting intention reports would be released to alert the producer to anticipate shortages or surpluses in advance; and the availability of crop production forecasts would remove the element of surprise.
ARC division manager Karl Monnik said Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Remote Sensing Technology and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) would be used to gather information on crop estimates. – Sapa