Thousands of sugar workers and farmers across KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga are watching their incomes shrink, and the government has yet to offer a date for the policy fix they say will determine whether their industry survives.
The numbers are unambiguous. Sugar imports more than doubled in the first five months of 2026, reaching nearly 95,000 tonnes compared to just over 55,000 tonnes in the same period a year earlier. The industry puts the damage at R1.5 billion in lost revenue. For growers, mill workers, and the rural communities built around sugar production, the surge is not an abstraction. It is a direct threat to wages and livelihoods.
Joseph Mathunjwa, president of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, has become the loudest voice for labour’s frustration. He wants immediate government action and, critically, transparency about which companies are importing sugar from Brazil, Thailand, and India. “The public has a right to know who is profiting while South African jobs and productive capacity are being destroyed,” Mathunjwa said this week. His argument is that trade agreements should shield local production rather than expose workers to competition from countries that subsidise their sugar sectors and use integrated ethanol programmes to offload surplus product at artificially low prices.
Matthew Parks, speaking for Cosatu, put a human number to the geography of the crisis. Thousands of small, emerging, and commercial farmers in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga depend on a stable industry. Parks raised particular alarm about what he called “illicit sugar flooding through our ports of entry,” much of it from Brazil, with some imports fraudulently repackaged as locally produced sugar. With national unemployment sitting at 43.8%, he said South Africa cannot afford to lose these jobs.
Dr Thomas Funke, chief executive of SA Canegrowers, has pressed the same point from the industry side. The sector submitted its request for a tariff adjustment more than 18 months ago, and the process is still incomplete. “The longer the delay continues, the more local sales are displaced and the greater the pressure becomes on growers, mills and workers,” Funke said.
Meanwhile, the government’s response has moved at a different pace. The DTIC has remained tight-lipped about which companies are sourcing imported sugar. Kaamil Alli, spokesperson for DTIC Minister Parks Tau, said this week that the government’s intervention remains “far from finalised.”
At the centre of the dispute is a mechanism called the Dollar-Based Reference Price, a benchmark used to calculate tariffs on imported sugar when international prices fall below a set level. The DTIC says it is prioritising movement of the reference price through the system, but implementation requires consultation with the national treasury and formal gazetting. “The details will be shared in the gazette and we are not able to share this publicly at this stage,” Alli said.
One retailer has broken ranks on the import question. Shoprite, the JSE-listed food retailer, said it sources sugar only from local producers across its Shoprite, Checkers, Checkers Hyper, and Usave supermarkets, and that it supports the South African sugar industry’s master plan. The Mail and Guardian approached three JSE-listed companies on the question of sugar imports.
The DTIC has pointed to its work on the sugar master plan and to its handling of the Tongaat Hulett matter, where the company was removed from business rescue and placed on a path to stability through the Industrial Development Corporation. Alli described this as evidence of government commitment to rural communities.
Workers and industry representatives are not persuaded that these steps are enough. Mathunjwa has called specifically for intervention at South African ports, arguing that Transnet, a state-owned entity, should not be facilitating the destruction of a strategic industry. He has also called for import data to be disclosed by the South African Revenue Service, the International Trade Administration Commission, the DTIC, and the department of agriculture.
Parks said Cosatu supports the ITAC investigations into protection for local producers, but stressed that tariffs alone will not solve the problem. Electricity costs, logistics, diesel, and irrigation all need to be tackled, he said, alongside a revival of buy-local campaigns to sustain domestic industries.
The defining tension in the sector is the distance between the urgency felt by workers and farmers on the ground and the measured pace of government consultation. Each week that passes without a gazetted tariff adjustment, those people argue, means more local sales displaced and more pressure on the families who depend on the industry to put food on the table. Whether the DTIC’s process moves fast enough to matter is the question the sector is waiting to have answered.