African countries outside of South Africa remain potential agriculture and agribusiness investment destinations, but doing business in Africa holds many and varied risks and challenges. While there are challenges that are common to all countries, such as infrastructure limitations, each country must be viewed and considered separately due to many challenges and risks, but also opportunities and strengths, being characteristic to a particular country. One of the Agbiz members, Valuechainsolutions, operates in many of these countries and has offered to provide readers of the Agbiz newsletter with their impressions of developments and doing business in certain countries. The first country considered in this series is Zambia. Please click on Impression of Zambia to peruse most interesting perspective on this country. The views are those of the authors, and not necessarily of Agbiz.

National Treasury recently published a number of draft Bills that would amend to tax regime in South Africa, and more specifically the taxation mechanisms designed to attract investment into SMEs and special economic zones (SEZ). At a recent consultation session held at the SARS offices in Pretoria, industry had the opportunity to interact with the policymakers and gain insight into the implications which these would have for their members. Agbiz head of Legal Intelligence Theo Boshoff reports on the meeting in the linked article.

In an interview on the KykNET programme  Grootplaas  last week, Theo Boshoff provided context to the report of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Land Reform and Agriculture. Please click here to watch the interview.

This has not been a good year for southern Africa's agricultural economy. The drought that started in October 2018 in some countries in the region and continued into 2019 has led to a double-digit decline in crop harvests. Take Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia: maize production in the 2018/2019 production season fell year on year by 20%, 12%, 53% and 16% respectively, according to the latest estimates from the International Grains Council. But there is cause for hope for southern Africa's 2020 agricultural performance, writes Agbiz chief economist Wandile Sihlobo in the linked article, written for and first published in Business Day.