The subjects for discussion were topical and particularly relevant to the current environment (both business and political) in which we find ourselves at present.

A serious concern, however, was the fact that U.S. / E.U. ‘trade politics’ once again surfaced and in the deliberations that followed, certain individual countries were placed in the situation where they felt obliged to compromise national interests in the interest of regional affiliations.

This is nothing new and an old tactic of United Nations organisations to ‘silence the voice’ of individual members in an effort to speed up the process of reaching ‘reasonable consensus’.

South Africa has followed a different evolutionary process owing to the many years of political isolation and has consequently very little in common with the rest of Africa, particularly as far as its seed sector is concerned.

This, of course, is not usually the case for other regional affiliations, as the European and South American regional seed associations for example. During a special meeting between the SANSOR General Manager and one of the Directors of the Asian Pacific Seed Association (APSA), it became clear that, although individual countries have more in common in the way in which they conduct their respective seed industries, there were also signs of certain constraints created by a certain level of diversity among countries.

During the past congress the FIS/ASSINSEL Secretariat encouraged a regional approach in an effort to resolve certain tricky issues. SANSOR subsequently found itself bogged down in an extremely anti-U.S. approach within AFSTA, which was not necessarily in the best interest of our local seed industry.

This was, once again, nothing new in international, agricultural trade politics and a popular means for certain world economic powers to manipulate the achievement of reasonable consensus. Apart from this incident, there were also indications that economic powers outside the African region were using AFSTA to promote their own interests at the expense of intra-regional market development. There were consequently indications that AFSTA was, unintentionally, achieving goals, which were contrary to the initial objectives to promote regional trade.

It was further important to note that sub-Saharan countries were particularly sensitive to manipulation by South Africa and the fact that SANSOR had made significant inputs towards the establishment of AFSTA should not be assumed to render a weighted SANSOR influence in regional terms.