No show: can your fertiliser supplier walk away from their obligations?

Episode 3 analyst Andrew Whitelaw discusses the force majeure clause and what it means for your rights.

Transcript

00:00As this whole federaliser palaver continues to wreak havoc upon farming input supply chains,

00:06one of the things that will come up likely in the coming months is suppliers using the

00:11force majeure clause in their contracts. We wrote a little bit about this on episode3.net

00:15yesterday and it should go into stock and land etc in the next couple of days. But one of the

00:21key things is that the force majeure clause, you have to understand your rights. So it's going to

00:28give you a couple of tips. The force majeure clause is basically there to protect a contract for if

00:36consequences arise from things that are unexpected. War is a pretty good force majeure clause. It's not

00:41a get up with jail card for the supplier. So what you need to do as a farmer is understand

00:46your rights.

00:47I'm just going to give you a couple of tips here. One, check your contract. But two,

00:53you don't need to accept just a general statement of, you know, the Iran war has occurred

00:57we can't supply tough luck. You want more than that. You want details. You want have what is the

01:05cause of the incident? Where do they get their supply from? Where else have they tried to get

01:09the supply from? Because that's a key thing. Just because it's expensive for them to supply the

01:15contract doesn't mean that they can't supply it. It might cost them a lot more money and they might

01:21lose their profits. But the reality is if it's available elsewhere in the world, for instance,

01:26they might have a contract that is not getting supplied from Iran or Qatar or anywhere else in

01:31that Middle Eastern sector. But there are other places in the world, the Gulf, the US Gulf or the

01:38Gulf of America, as Trump calls it. But there's also Asian suppliers as well. So you have to make sure

01:43that they've actually done best effort to try and get that supply. Bear in mind, the force majeure is

01:49not about price. It's about supply. So know your rights, read the article we put down and get

01:54yourself some legal advice.