Abstract
The study estimates sunflower supply response in South Africa using time series data from 1947 to 2016, modelled through the Nerlovian Partial Adjustment approach. Short- and long-run price elasticities of 0.238 and 0.313 respectively, suggest that farmers do not easily adjust acreage devoted to sunflower given price changes, indicating the influence of other non-price factors. An adjustment coefficient of 0.272 indicates that the time taken to adjust from the actual to the desired acreage level is slow, at 27% per year. The estimated elasticities provide some scope for using price and non-price incentives to influence sunflower production in the long-run. This could facilitate decision-making by sunflower producers to spearhead internal and external adjustment processes. The study contributes to a growing body of literature on agricultural supply response determinants, thus providing evidence-based macro-economic tools towards agricultural policy-making and reform process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The major influential changes in the global sunflower market were characterized by the transformation of a highly regulated international industry to an essentially free one (Meyer Citation2005; SAGIS Citation2006).
2 These crops were chickpea, lentil, mung, mash, wheat, cotton, sugarcane, maize and rice.
3 This builds from work on a poster presented at the 55th AEASA conference by Mamabolo et al. (Citation2017) on agricultural research data rescue through collaborative partnerships.