The COVID-19 pandemic has put the global food system under sustained pressure and has triggered various policy responses to manage both supply and demand....

SA must jump into action to avert climatic shocks as the average annual cost of US weather disasters soars....

In recent years, the world has encountered a range of compounding shocks: droughts, floods, wildfires, cyclones, and most recently, a worldwide pandemic that has taken over 3.3 million lives—some estimates even indicate up to 13 million deaths. Although the pandemic will (eventually) pass, the next global challenge is already upon us. Climatic shocks are expected to increase in frequency and severity.Agriculture—still the most important sector in many poor countries—is directly affected by climatic shocks. Besides threatening global food security and stability, these shocks can cripple livelihoods, disrupt value chains, and even undermine macroeconomic stability. Climatic shocks have caused significant budget volatility in recent years and deepened corruption challenges. Agriculture insurance can be an antidote to these risks: It de-risks lending to the farm sector enabling repayment of loans, reduces budget volatility of agriculture-related fiscal expenditures by transferring climatic risk to the private sector, increases fiscal space during shock years, and stimulates growth of the agriculture sector, which can unlock job creation potential. It can even reduce the scope for fiscal leakages and corruption.THE CASE FOR PUBLIC POLICYBut agriculture insurance suffers from market failures and information asymmetries that require government intervention to achieve scale and sustainability (see “Government Support to Agricultural Insurance” by Olivier Mahul and Charles Stutley). Information asymmetries arise as farmers understand their risk profile better than insurance companies, introducing scope for anti-selection and moral hazard. Insurance companies need high quality yield data to vet and underwrite products. Being both non-rivalrous and excludable, yield data are a public good, necessitating government intervention to avoid monopolization. Besides, while insurance companies are in the business of managing risk, they often have limited appetite for agricultural risk given its exposure to catastrophic losses from single events. This leads to rationing of exposure or even refusal to underwrite agricultural risks by insurance companies. Finally, farmers often have low levels of financial awareness requiring public support for financial education programs.Figure 1. A straightforward rationale for government intervention ...

Key Recommendations ...

Vehicles globally will require higher loadings of metals to meet stringent emissions standards...

Despite a vibrant agricultural sector, there are a standard list of challenges that SA agribusinesses commonly cite — land-reform policy, droughts and infrastructure are among the most frequently cited. However, a growing challenge facing firms — particularly those in beef, wool, fruit and wine — is the need to identify new markets....

The International Panel on Climate Change says challenges are to increase as temperatures rise at twice the global average...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the widespread use of expansionary fiscal policies which, in terms of scale, is simply unprecedented. An estimated eye-watering $12 trillion of discretionary fiscal support has been provided globally during the pandemic. Such expenditure has come in the form of support to the unemployed, small businesses, and struggling sectors in an effort to save livelihoods and keep economies buoyant. Crucially, though, for many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, these fiscal stimuli packages have deepened their debt challenges....

Abstract: With platinum prices declining due to a seismic demand shift and firms grappling with the high cost of labor and prolonged production-stopping labor strikes, the financial sustainability of platinum group metal (PGM) firms has come under duress since 2012. This article seeks to understand how mining firms have reshaped their strategies to ensure financial sustainability while also meeting external expectations of increasing shared-value outcomes by assessing how firms are deploying buffers and bridges. Firms use buffers when they seek to protect core business activities from supply-side and demand-side volatilities by shifting their overall business strategy and bridges to conform with external expectations of improving shared-value outcomes. The article constructs a case study using five sets of data to assess (i) what supply and demand shocks firms are facing; (ii) how they are reshaping their strategies and undertaking activities to protect the firm from these shocks; (iii) what challenges firms face with reaching shared-value outcomes; and (iv) how firms are undertaking activities to improve shared-value outcomes. This article finds that although buffering activities have been successful at increasing the financial sustainability of mining activities, bridging activities have been less successful given that royalties are vulnerable to maladministration, the impact of corporate social investments often short-lived, and insular and local procurement is limited to low-value-added activities, particularly in the context of mechanization. This article seeks to contribute to the body of literature on how extractive firms are responding to supply and demand shocks and argues that a paradigm shift may be necessary in which traditional bridging activities become part of protecting core business activities to ameliorate the risk of losing a firm’s social license to operate....

Climate change is opening a window of economic opportunity for Zimbabwe, a country that has long been on the periphery of the global economy due to political and economic instability....

First step is to intensify productivity in agricultural and mineral resources....

In response to the adverse economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the South African government expanded its system of social assistance through a short-term 6-month heterogeneous increase in all existing social grants. In addition though, the state introduced a special COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, set at R350 per month....