Action needed to reverse SA canned deciduous fruit sector’s declining competitiveness

South Africa’s canned deciduous fruit sector has, with one exception, been on a declining international competitiveness trajectory since 2016, a PhD research project at Stellenbosch University has found. Canned deciduous fruits embrace peaches, pears, apricots and mixed fruits. The sector has been globally competitive from the early 1960s, and from 2002 to 2021 was the third most competitive such industry in the world, after Greece and Spain. However, the South African sector’s Relative Trade Advantage (RTA) rating (which measures competitiveness), which stood at 23.03 in 2016, had fallen to 17.02 in 2020. The exception to this decline was the pears subsector, whose RTA rating actually increased from 33.96 to 40.40 over the same period. Of course, the strong performance of canned pears increased the average RTA for the whole sector and disguised just how much other subsectors declined.