The impact of regional integration on Southern African agriculture

Your Conference Organising Committee has done me a signal honour in asking me to deliver the Simon Brand Memorial Lecture. Indeed, I feel doubly honoured since Simon Brand was a personal friend of mine and someone whom I held in high esteem. He was a man of integrity, and this, together with his intellectual rigour, led to his being highly respected by all shades of political opinion. He played an important role in supporting socio-political change in South Africa, and I have no doubt that, but for his untimely death, he would have assumed an even more important role in the new South Africa post-1994. One of the fields in which he had become increasingly interested was that of economic cooperation across the Southern African region. As Simon Brand was an agricultural economist by training, I hope he would have approved of the topic which I have chosen to consider in this lecture.