Select RSA Group Reflections May 2025
Dear friends
The World Union of Wholesale Markets (WUWM) conference, held in Joburg this May, was a fascinating event, filled with an extremely wide range of global stakeholders and an impressive range of activity, and conversations. It was a generally bigger and more engaging series of days than many may have anticipated. From an RSA Group perspective, our team was certainly impressed by the people we encountered, the depth of our interactions and the business development opportunities that arose.
Like most people, I often struggle to focus immediately before speaking in public. In the run up to RSA Group’s WUWM presentation, I distracted myself by going to the RSA Group stand and observing our team in action: working like a truly well oiled machine, attending to questions, taking down names, updating contact lists and at all times being true ambassadors for our brand. I would like to offer sincere thanks to Litha, Gabi, Jenna and the team. Your work not only delivered everything required during the conference, but also settled my apprehension and motivated me to deliver the message we wanted to get across about how unique and powerful South Africa’s open market system really is.
The vital point of our presentation at WUWM was how the structure of South Africa’s open market system enables fundamentally authentic, and transparent, price discovery, and therefore grows trust from all role players. In our industry, price discovery is often talked about as involving a lot of ‘gut feel’. This is true in many respects, but there is also a far deeper systemic reality at play. The trust we have in our system is far more than a feeling – it arises from the integrity and guardrails of the system itself. This is the crucial context that allows our producers to be both (optimum) price takers and value makers who grow strong operations on the foundation of quality income streams.
While many of our experienced industry professionals understand this concept well, it’s still a tricky point to get across in a short presentation to a packed audience from many different parts of the world.
We captured the idea with a video, created that morning, of me buying items at the Joburg market. Selfie stick in hand, I filmed myself purchasing wonderfully fresh chillies and mandarins, which we handed out to the WUWM crowd while the video played. This turned out to be a great way to show how price discovery functions on a daily basis at South Africa’s markets, and also to illustrate the importance and strength of the open market system itself. I was able to explain to the audience the quite remarkable fact (especially when viewed from a global context, where many producers do business within a very limited range of options) that the revenue from my purchases would land in the farmers’ bank accounts the very next evening. This is a cash conversion cycle that would impress any businessman anywhere in the world, and it definitely resonated at the WUWM conference.
The South African fresh produce open market system is one of the best kept secrets in global agriculture. While it was obviously a pleasure to share it with the WUWM audience, the greater success of our presentation, I believe, was the response we received from that audience. Based on their reactions, I am confident that our message about the power of the South African open market system will steadily spread, and that we will inevitably see our unique approach to the fresh produce value chain being rolled out in key areas of the African continent, and far beyond, in future years.
Best wishes
Jaco Oosthuizen
