Just found this - it is on the Reuters news site:

"Cargill defends wariness over S.Africa Y2K risks Updated 10:06 AM ET September 3, 1999 JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - U.S. commodities giant Cargill confirmed Friday it had sent a letter to South Africa's Department of Agriculture saying it would avoid trading in South Africa over the millennium because of Y2K fears. But the company's managing director in South Africa, Mike Davies, told Reuters the letter did not mean that Cargill would do no business at all in South Africa during the period.

"The concerns are that one cannot be 100 percent sure that all the utilities and support systems in South Africa will continue to operate," Davies said.

"What we've never said is that we will not trade with South Africa. We've taken a conservative approach...but South Africa is no more risky than many other countries."

In July, Cargill sent a letter to the Department of Agriculture saying research had shown that South Africa's communications and inter-bank settlement facilities faced Y2K risks and that business would therefore be cut back temporarily.

"We plan to avoid entering into or executing trades in maize, oilseed, wheat or any other commodity from December 15 to January 15," Davies quoted the letter as saying.

The Y2K problem -- or the millennium bug -- is the fear that computers based on a double-digit numeric system for registering the year will read "00" as 1900 instead of 2000 and cause mass disruptions in computer networks.

Cargill said its decision was based largely on a report by the Gartner Group, an information technology firm specializing in Y2K compliance, which last year ranked South Africa as a medium to high risk.

Gartner Friday said South Africa had been upgraded since last year, and its website now ranks it as one of just 17 countries in the world, including the U.S. and Switzerland, that have made "significant progress" with Y2K compliance.

The National Y2K Center says all South Africa's critical services -- water supply, electricity, waste disposal, telecommunications, health and emergency services -- are Y2K ready, as are all 18 government departments"

-- Kristi (securxsys@cs.com), September 03, 1999

Answers

Here is the URL I was able to find the above article at:

http://news.excite.com/news/r/990903/10/y2k-safrica

-- Kristi (securxsys@cs.com), September 03, 1999.

Funny... I was just reading this article. This is about a huge commodities concern acting upon information, supposedly some of the best information in the world, provided by a research organization. Yet, the story concludes with this line:

"The central bank said in June that all banking and financial systems were ready for the millennium and that the biggest fear was ill- informed humans who might decide to make irrational withdrawals of cash from banks during the end-year period."

Do you smell the disconnect?

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), September 03, 1999.