Marketing of Agricultural Products Act, 1996 (Act No. 47 of 1996)

The purpose of this statutory measure is to provide a statutory mechanism for milk producers to keep records and furnish returns to the Milk Producers' Organisation. This is deemed necessary to ensure that continuous timeous and accurate statistics and information relating to the dairy farming industry is made available to all role players.

Record keeping of the dairy cattle population will create statistics per province and districts of the numbers of cows, bulls, heifers and breeds. This information will indicate possible changing population trends per province for the industry to predict milk production trends. The monitoring of trends of herd sizes and dairy breeds as well as the location thereof will assist the industry in steering its educational, research, extension and health programmes.

This statutory measure relating to records and returns will also promote the research objectives and product quality on matters relating to animal health, production quality, genetics and feeding to proactively conduct research where problem areas are identified. Furthermore, the technical complex nature of the production of unprocessed milk which involves several different fields of expertise and in respect of which, in a coordinated way, research is required to contribute to an increase in the performance of the producers of unprocessed milk to the benefit of the dairy industry and consumers.