Derek Mathews watches as an old fuel pump fills a tractor with diesel on his 1 700 hectare arable farm in \u200cSouth Africa’s (SA) North West Province.<\/p>\n
He frets over a nagging concern: how to secure and afford more fuel supplies before harvesting starts.<\/p>\n
“It’s terribly expensive to buy fuel at the moment, but the question I need to answer right now is can I get fuel?” Mathews, 64, told Reuters<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Farmers in SA and many other countries are struggling with a double price blow,\u00a0fuel and fertilizer costs have shot up as the United States, Israeli war against Iran stifles key energy transit routes like \u2060the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n
While SA government officials and fuel industry executives have assured that the country’s stocks are sufficient for April, famers say suppliers are grappling with higher demand, logistics constraints and hoarding of diesel.<\/p>\n
Mathews, who purchased 20 000 litres of diesel in February at $ 1.07 a litre, said he had about 12 000 litres left by March 30, or six days’ worth of fuel for his farm as he prepares to harvest his sunflower and maize crops.<\/p>\n
According to a March survey by agricultural body AgriSA, slightly fewer than half of farmers surveyed had difficulty sourcing diesel. Others managed inadequate purchases of between 50 and 500 litres.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14477,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[44],"class_list":["post-30520","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-finance","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"","published_date":"","news_description":"Fuel pump fills a tractor with diesel on 1 700 hectare arable farm in SA","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/30520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/30520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30521,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/30520\/revisions\/30521"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=30520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}