South Africa’s economy has felt like a car stuck in second gear for the past year. Official figures from Statistics South Africa’s quarterly GDP reports (P0441 series, released between December 2024 and September 2025) tell the story:
- Q3 2024: -0.3%
- Q4 2024: +0.6%
- Q1 2025: +0.1%
- Q2 2025: +0.8%
Four quarters of barely there growth. Load shedding eased, but ports clogged, freight trains limped, and global demand stayed lukewarm.
Yet inside the same official statistics, two small sectors never stumbled once.
Buried inside the “agriculture, forestry and fishing” bucket — the first of Stats SA’s 10 big industry groups that together make up South Africa’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the value of everything the country produces — are commercial forestry and marine fisheries.
While field crops and livestock rode a terrifying roller coaster — crashing almost 30% in Q3 2024 then roaring back with double-digit rebounds (Stats SA P0441: -28.8%, +17.2%, +15.8%, +2.8% respectively) — the forests and the oceans refused to join the ride.
Rock-steady
Quarter after quarter, according to production data from the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) and industry bodies Forestry South Africa and the South African Deep-Sea Trawling Industry Association, timber harvesting and fish landings stayed rock-steady or edged gently higher — typically between +0.5% and +2% every single quarter. No red numbers. No panic.
Picture the primary sector as an ox-wagon crossing a treacherous river. The big, powerful front oxen — maize, citrus, cattle — bucked and reared when the current rose. Meanwhile the two steady wheelers at the back, forestry and fisheries, dug in their hooves and kept the whole wagon moving forward.
Here’s what that quiet consistency actually delivered:
- Commercial forestry (approximately R32-billion to R34-billion a year in direct value added, 2023-2024 estimates from Stats SA and Forestry South Africa) runs on eight- to 35-year planting cycles. Trees don’t care about one bad summer. When the rains failed in 2024, the sawmills and pulp mills never missed a shift.
- Marine fisheries (approximately R9-billion to R10-billion a year, 2023-2024 estimates from Stats SA and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment) operate under some of the world’s strictest science-based quotas. When the Benguela current wobbled, scientists adjusted the Total Allowable Catch, fleets adapted, and hake, anchovy and rock lobster kept coming ashore. Exports of frozen and canned fish continued flowing even while citrus containers queued for weeks at the ports.
Together they employ tens of thousands in rural Mpumalanga, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and coastal towns from Saldanha to Gqeberha — jobs that did not disappear when farms laid off workers during the drought.
These are not giant sectors. Combined, they are less than 0.4% of South Africa’s total GDP. But in a country that lurches from one climate shock to the next, their behaviour is pure gold: predictable, export-earning, job-protecting, and almost completely immune to the chaos that cripples rain-fed agriculture.
They are living proof — right here, right now — that South Africa already knows how to build economic activities that don’t collapse when the weather turns nasty or the rand dives. We just need to copy the recipe more widely.
So yes, raise a glass to the maize farmers who clawed their way back from the brink and to the citrus growers who found new markets in Asia. Their fight was heroic.
But save a quiet nod for the foresters who never had to fight, and the fishing communities who never missed a tide. In an age of climate volatility, they are the steady heartbeat under the drama — the old, wise trees and the deep, patient ocean that simply keep giving, no matter what the headlines say.
That, more than any dramatic rebound, might be the real good-news story of the past year. DM
Shelton Mollentze was the special adviser to the former minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment.