Business Day

29 May 2026

When Eastern Cape farmer Gary Miles found two grain pits in 1975 “beneath a clump of scotia trees”, as recounted by historian Anne Kelk Mager, the pits were “large enough to hold bags of mealies”, and “their solid walls of tightly packed mud and dung” were still intact.

The grain pits (izisele in Xhosa) had ostensibly been there for 100 years or more. Miles made the discovery about a century after abaThembu chief Gungubele, great-grandfather of deputy communications & digital technologies minister Mondli Gungubele, had bought the farm Mapassa Poort for £2,200.

What Miles found as he was preparing his land for the plough was a food storage system that was crucial to the material culture of the abaThembu people who lived in the area near Queen-stown.

One is reminded of this episode, and Miles’s discovery more than 50 years ago, as communit-ies and nations the world over set up their own “grain pits” in response to hostilities around key supply chain chokepoints and energy and food insecurity. Measures unimaginable a few decades ago are now seemingly in vogue. Not only in food, but also in areas of activity where nations feel they have some “leverage”.

Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Guinea and Australia have imposed export restrictions on lithium, nickel, bauxite and liquefied natural gas supplies respectively. In the case of the Canberra government this has involved reserving a share of gas production for local use. Australia accounts for about a fifth of the global trade in natural gas.

Guinea used to supply about three quarters of the bauxite raw material China needs for its aluminium smelters. In Indonesia, nickel export curbs have been reinforced by a requirement that coal, palm oil and ferroalloys be controlled through a state firm linked to a sovereign wealth fund.

These moves in an increasingly hostile world raise crucial questions, especially for a country such as South Africa that relies on the commodity trade as an earner of foreign exchange. How will key buyers respond? Will they always opt to invest in refineries at source, such as the recent Chinese State Power Investment Corporation investment in Guinea?

Or will it result in stockpiling, which can cause deflated prices when those who hold excess stocks release them to the market? Export curbs can be a crucial instrument to smooth the price volatility associated with being a large producer but a price-taker. However, it may also incentivise stockpiling, and in some instances a shift to substitutes.

What combination of public goods or “social overhead capital” (roads, rail, water, amenities and so on) translates such leverage to higher value activities within global value chains?

Smelters and refineries need energy, a lot of it, at cheap rates. It may need an accompanying chemical-industrial and research and development complex to identify efficient uses of exist-ing applications of these minerals, and the discovery of new uses. Having the minerals and the leverage alone is not enough.

As recent price shifts in crude oil and urea, a crucial blending material for fertiliser, show, there is also an existential challenge to developing countries to create buffer stocks or reserves of crude, food and other crucial inputs. Without these stabilisers governments and households may confront chaotic changes in costs and prices.

These changes may also wreak havoc on the formulaic determination of administered prices, whether this is the determination of fuel prices, the multiyear determination of electricity prices or other costs where the state is a price-setter to varying degrees.

As Miles found under the scotia tree in 1975, the solid walls of a tightly packed grain pit gave the abaThembu communities of the Eastern Cape some assurance of continuity even under distressing conditions of drought and war.

Nearly a 150 years since Gungubele we have an opportunity to set up our own stabilisers that can also endure centuries of uncertainty with some resolve and prescient planning.

Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.