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Eating out these days feels incredibly indulgent.

Even if you budget these fancy extras out of your month’s spending, you may still find that your piggy bank is losing a lot of weight lately.

With the cost of living already pretty high, we’re all shvitzing a little come month’s end.

Load shedding, the absolute bane of all our existences, is naturally compounding these issues like never before.

Without power, our agriculture industries’ productivity is nosediving fast and furious.

Besides being a financial driver of the SA economy, agriculture is critical because it feeds the nation.

Christo van der Rheede, an executive director at Agri SA, spoke to 702 and said that the blackouts are having huge snowball effects on agriculture businesses, including those dealing with livestock and crops.

He said that South Africa’s food security might become regrettable if these power cuts continue to have an effect:

“If you’re a dairy farmer. You cannot milk your cows. You cannot keep your milk in a cold storage facility when there’s no electricity… The same applies to irrigation farmers that are irrigating grains, maize, sugar cane, also other crops”

“What is important is that farmers are still producing food at a large cap. And that’s the nice thing… The bigger issue is the affordability of food, and we’ve seen a spike in the price of all kinds of basic stuff. That’s why the poultry industry has called on the minister to zero-rate chicken, for example, to make it cheaper.”

Business Insider reports, too, that the price of some staple food groups is expected to rise as load shedding takes its toll on the agricultural sector:

On 13 January, relevant stakeholders in the farming industry, including those in grain, poultry, dairy and more, held a meeting with the minister of agriculture Thoko Didiza.

In the meeting, stakeholders noted that the non-stop rolling blackouts halted irrigation systems and factory floors.

The poultry industry raised major concerns over the regulation of chicken coops and the fact that they may be unable to slaughter enough – leading to shortages on store shelves.

It’s a little too late now, as the South African Poultry Association has already confirmed that chicken products are lessening in the country as the farms are unable to effectively slaughter the animals for produce.

More than 10 million chicks had to be culled over the course of the last six weeks already.

If this trajectory continues, we will be expected to pay way more for chicken and other foods.

[source:businesstech&702]