SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, U.S. — S&W Seed Co. and AGT Foods Africa Pty Ltd. are partnering to form a new joint venture in South Africa that will produce and commercialize seed products in Africa. The new company will be called SeedVision SA Pty Ltd., and will be 50.1% owned by S&W and 49.9% owned by AGT Foods Africa.

SeedVision said it plans to leverage AGT Foods Africa’s production and processing facilities to produce S&W’s hybrid sunflower, grain sorghum and forage sorghum for sale by SeedVision in the African continent, Middle East countries and Europe. Meanwhile, AGT Foods Africa has agreed to utilize its production resources in South Africa, Zambia and Tanzania, and its seed cleaning and warehousing facilities at Krugersdorp, South Africa.

“We are pleased to partner with AGT to expand the availability of our sorghum and sunflower products into the African market,” said Mark Wong, chairman and chief executive officer of S&W. “AGT is a large international provider of food ingredients throughout the world and the addition of sorghum and sunflower expands their already large menu of staple foods and food ingredients. Africa represents a large market and we look forward to a successful collaboration with AGT to develop this critically important market for these important products.”

Murad Al-Katib, president and CEO of AGT, said the company has viewed Southern Africa as a “key production origin” to meet global food production needs.

“Through our Africa platform, with AGT Foods Africa and our management team there, we have continued working to grow our geographic distribution and production platforms in the region,” Al-Katib said. “Seed availability of all crops is a critical component to growing production and is an area that AGT is focused on in the many agricultural production origins we operate in. Our newly announced partnership with S&W to form this new joint venture allows us to extend our key processing and distribution assets in Southern Africa to grow opportunities for more targeted agricultural production of these important crops in the region.”

AGT Foods Africa is a subsidiary of AGT Food and Ingredients, a Canadian-based supplier of value-added pulses, staple foods and food ingredients.