By Lloyd Phillips
African Farming is celebrating along with two Eastern Free State farmers who finally received the tracks they imported for their harvesters, from SARS customs at Johannesburg’s O R Tambo International Airport.
Pieter van Zyl and a fellow farmer in the Eastern Free State wasted no time in swapping out the conventional drive wheels on their harvesters for the imported Soucy tracks and then getting back into their muddy fields to bring in their long harvest-ready soybean crops.
African Farming has closely followed, and reported on, the immensely distressing and costly delays that Van Zyl in the Vrede district and an unnamed fellow farmer in the Bethlehem district experienced after SARS customs inexplicably withheld the three pairs of desperately needed imported Soucy tracks.
It collectively cost the farmers about R5 million to purchase and air-freight the tracks that landed in Johannesburg on 27 April. Van Zyl says the tracks were only released by SARS customs 18 days later, after an almost R1 million SARS penalty and R200 000 warehousing fees were first paid.
Clear reasons as to how and why the tracks were bonded remain hard to come by, but suspicions are that there was administrative bungling by one or more of the private companies that were tasked with facilitating customs clearances for the tracks. It also remains unknown who took responsibility for and paid the R1,2 million penalty and warehousing fees, but it was not the two farmers.
Meanwhile, Van Zyl is now harvesting flat-out to try and save as much of his standing soybean crops after the pods already began bursting in the fields while the tracks were stuck in limbo. He estimates he has lost an average of one ton per hectare of potential yield as a result.
