THE South African dairy industry has had its ups and downs, but few realise how close the country came to losing it almost entirely.At the EY World Entrepreneur of the Year awards in Monaco in 2016, Clover CEO Johann Vorster revealed how the dairy industry was almost lost between the shoals of a terrible business model and the reefs of asset strippers. The effect would have been "disastrous" and the dairy industry would have been reduced to a state of subsistence.Clover is now hitting its straps, with profitability at record levels and it is preparing a huge new "dairy industrial park", which will include the continent’s first baby food processor.The transition of this country’s agricultural co-operatives into companies has been one of the undercurrent features of the domestic agribusiness sector in the past two decades. Co-ops emerged out of the apartheid era with a terrible reputation for being stultifying behemoths, typically run by farmers whose interests were basic and one-dime...
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