AGBIZ@ ASSOCIATES

MISSION STATEMENT:

"THE DEVELOPMENT AND DISSEMINATION OF STRATEGIC ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE WITHIN THE AGRICULTURAL ENVIRONMENT".

South African agriculture is increasingly being challenged to compete on local and international level; to promote increased access for developing agriculture; and to promote ecological sustainability. Both the private and public sectors are facing strategic choices within this milieu. The need for agricultural economic intelligence, and particularly agricultural business and resource studies, to support strategic decision-making processes on policy and operational level, is to an increasing extent being emphasized.

Few organizations in agriculture have all the expertise to fully address these challenges for South African agriculture and to generate strategic information for this purpose. For this reason, co-operation amongst experts will be of great benefit to agriculture.

This vision resulted in the formation of AGBIZ@ between the following institutions:

Agrimark Consultants (Dr Johan Willemse, tel (012) 335 1076);
Standard Bank: Agricultural Division (Mr Bertus van Heerden,
tel (011) 636 9112);

The Agricultural Research Council (Mr Johan Carstens,
tel (012) 427 9750);

The Agricultural Business Chamber (Dr Johan van Rooyen,
tel (012) 322 7181); and

The Department of Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development, University of Pretoria (Prof Johann Kirsten,
tel (012) 420 3248).

Each of these groups regards the development of strategic economic intelligence as a generic and basic element for their distinctive, more focussed and unique requirements, whether it be agribusiness and financial decision-making, agricultural policy analysis and advice, technological development and impact analyses. This need necessitates the introduction and maintenance of systems that collect, analyse, process and distribute strategic intelligence.

Fundamental to these needs is the striving for excellence which each associate can achieve through co-operation.

AGBIZ@ will collectively and on a synergistic basis, generate strategic intelligence through the combination of and interaction between their own unique fields of expertise. Such co-operation activates the concept of comparable advantage. The Agricultural Business Chamber will act as secretariat for AGBIZ@.

AGBIZ@ will focus on the following:

• Competitiveness and Business Potential Analyses: The conducting of sectoral, commodity and business analyses (including business chain studies) in order to, inter alia, determine the long term competitiveness and potential industries and to identify and analyse aspects which influence comparative advantage positions.

• Agricultural Resource Studies: The conducting of resource studies (water, soil, capital, management and labour) to direct strategic and long term planning and decision-making within the agricultural environment (macro and micro levels).

• Market Studies: The analysis of market structures and trends in order to position agricultural products for added value activities within the local, regional and international environment.

• Policy analysis

AGBIZ@ will offer four types of services:

• Strategic intelligence development as directly requested by AGBIZ@ (information to associates, reports, database, etc).

• Commercial intelligence (reports, database, etc) to clients at market-related prices.

• Fundamental and basic research and strategic analysis: This work will be orientated and serve as basis for future operational intelligence.

• The strengthening and development of an intelligence network for use by AGBIZ@.

e-mail: [email protected]

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