South Africa must play catch-up and put the ‘culture’ back into agriculture

Businesses create value through transformation, and doing so can be a fairly simple process. You add value to wheat by milling it into flour. You add value to flour by baking it into bread. You can add value to bread by innovating it — into a French baguette, an artisanal sourdough boule, or square crustless loaves perfectly packaged for school lunches.

Transformation and innovation occur in response to customer demand, market research, technological breakthroughs or eureka moments by clever marketers.

But there’s another mechanism of value creation that’s often overlooked — beneficiation through culture and cultural heritage.

How does culture create value?

Culture is most often used downstream — when selling or marketing a brand or product. Advertisers tap into trends and piggyback off contemporary culture whenever possible. After all, a cultural hit becomes a market hit, as the brand strategist Ana Andjelic so eloquently argues.

However, in South Africa culture is seldom used to innovate upstream — at a category level. Some industries and countries, such as Italy and Japan, have been tapping into culture to transform and add upstream value to produce for centuries.

Italy has a policy of fiercely protecting and promoting regional and local produce and agri-food products. Wherever possible, it sees local produce not as a fungible commodity, but as a unique marker of cultural heritage and local identity. By using culture as a prism through which to redefine a commodity, it can add value to it, and then use legal instruments to ringfence this value.

More than 300 Italian food products and 500 Italian wines enjoy protected legal status because of their unique provenance and cultural value. This value-creation tactic delivers significant market share for its industries and builds the reputation of brand Italy as a cultural and agri-food superpower.

Each of its protected products falls into one of three categories: Protected Designation of Origin (DOP), Protected Geographical Indication (IGP) or Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG). These categories make certain promises to consumers about origin and locality, the unique characteristics of the product and the place of production.

In the case of DOP classification, all production must occur within a defined geographical area. In the case of IGP products, only one step in the production process has to take place in a defined area. More than one in four geographically indicated and protected (GI) products in the world comes from Italy.

From balsamic vinegar and Parmigiano Reggiano to panforte and Parma ham, by carefully controlling the definition, production, provenance and supply of these products, food producers can charge a premium, grow global demand and benefit from the security of knowing that nobody else, by definition, can compete with them. They will always be the only producers of this product. Pure value is created, and protected, through culture.

This extends to fresh produce too. San Marzano tomatoes, from Italy’s Campania region, are DOP certified and globally sought after for use in pastas and pizzas. Similarly, the IGP-certified red onion from Tropea, in Calabria, is famed for being both mild and sweet.

Italy has more protected foods than any other nation in Europe. The Italian food and beverage industry is worth almost a quarter of the national GDP. From farm to table, four million workers are involved across farms, food industries, restaurants and retail outlets.

What about South Africa?

The only South African product that enjoys Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status in Europe is rooibos tea — the first African agricultural product to receive this designation. This achievement was largely due to a collaborative effort between producers and the departments of Agriculture, Trade and Industry, and International Relations. The European Union (EU) recognised rooibos by granting it PDO status as part of the SADC-EU Economic Partnership Agreement in 2014.

Playing catch-up, South Africa finally promulgated geographical indication regulations for the local market in February 2023. This means that local food producers can now register products as either PDO or IGP.

Thus far, the only product that has since received local certification is Karoo Lamb. By contrast, the European Union has an online searchable database of more than 5,600 legally protected foods and agricultural products.

Why only Karoo Lamb? Is this because the government isn’t doing enough to promote the potential of what I like to refer to as “cultural beneficiation”? Is it because local industry sees agricultural produce as a mere commodity? A melon is a melon is a melon?

If we looked at our produce through the lens of culture and heritage, could we not add, protect and create new value instead?

In Japan, Yūbari melons benefit from GI protection. Although these melons resemble our spanspeks, they can only be grown in the city of Yūbari, in Hokkaido. The Japanese government has agreed that due to the special geographic characteristics of where they are grown (climate and soil conditions), they qualify for GI protection.

At the same time, Japan has also developed an intricate culture (there’s that word again!) of giving fruit as gifts, similar to how we might give someone a bouquet. The key difference is that fruit used for gift-giving in Japan is expertly cultivated and carefully farmed for that purpose. It’s a category of fresh produce that has been created by culture.

These fruits are treated as luxury goods. In May, a pair of Yūbari melons fetched three million yen at the first auction of the season. That’s about R350,000 for a pair of melons.

What made these melons so special? Culture. And of course, some careful farming. But these melons aren’t an exception — Japan’s luxury fruit industry is a large and well-established sector. From square watermelons to white strawberries, the Japanese use culture and novelty to add value to commodities, and as a result, have built a reputation for producing some of the best quality fruit in the world.

So perhaps, if we dare to imagine it, a South African spanspek could become more than a mere melon.

Plenty of opportunities

Italian Parma ham is protected because it can only be made from the hind legs of selected heritage breed pigs in specific regions of Italy. Perhaps it’s time to create and protect local variations of biltong too.

What about Grabouw boerewors? Karringmelk beskuit? Amasi? Umqombothi? There already exist regional variations of the koeksister. Why not develop, protect and promote them?

We need to encourage local communities and local food producers to take advantage of this new legislative framework — and to remind South Africans that their culture and heritage are valuable.

With a little proactive collaboration from the government (take note ministers John Steenhuisen, Parks Tau and Gayton McKenzie), and food producers working together as consortia, South Africa can use the one thing it has in spades — culture — to start generating economic opportunities. This needn’t be done haphazardly.

A concerted, organised effort to create and promote these new self-reinforcing value chains is, if you’ll excuse the metaphor, low-hanging fruit.

We’re living in an age where culture is capital. It’s time to recognise this and act accordingly. DM

Timothy Zeelie is a cultural marketing and communications strategist. He lives and works in Cape Town and Milan.