Hilton Zunckel

Hilton Zunckel is the managing director at ‘HiltonLambert - Practitioners of Trade Law’.  He has a particular interest in trade in agriculture, with over 30 years of experience in this field. He is a unique practitioner in that he is able to complement advice on trade law and international agreements with in-depth experience in the practical commercial business of agricultural trade.

He has acted as the agriculture advisor to the African Caribbean and Pacific Group (ACP) and the West African cotton initiative (C4) in the course of the WTO Doha agriculture negotiations. He has been a member of joint government/business drafting teams that prepared South African submissions in WTO dispute settlement, and he is listed on the roster of WTO dispute settlement panellists. The core of his daily practice relates to all manner of advice to the agricultural sector, for food companies, agricultural associations and governments. Some of his assignments have included drafting an unfair trade practices text for a customs union and assisting in the legal review of a regional tribunal.

He previously served as the Assistant Executive Director of an agricultural industry association where he was intimately involved in trade policy and practice issues within the regional & global grain and food processing sectors. He served the industry during the reform process in establishing a free market environment in agriculture during the closure of the South African statutory control boards in agriculture. During this time, he assisted the industry with the first commercial imports of wheat into South Africa, including the design of a national standard grain trading contract.

He has served on several committees in liaising between business and government such as the trade committee of the South African Chamber of Business (SACOB) and the Agricultural Trade Forum (ATF). Hilton has previously had the opportunity to form part of South Africa’s representation to the WTO Committee on Agriculture, the International Grains Council, the International Food Assistance Convention and Southern African Customs Union (SACU) negotiating forums. Hilton has a keen acumen for the interface between law and finance which is particularly useful in interdisciplinary approaches to trade law issues and in the preparation of tariff and trade remedy applications. This skill was acquired in his early career when he worked in the auditing division of Ernst & Young.

Hilton has also contributed meaningfully to capacity building in Africa while serving as a senior researcher with the Trade Law Centre for Southern Africa (tralac), where he played a founding role in building the organization and its research programmes in its formative phase. He continues to serve as an external faculty member to several local universities and the WTO’s training and technical cooperation institute. His academic writing has been published internationally.

Hilton holds a Masters’ degree in International Law and Economics M.I.L.E. (summa cum laude) from Switzerland’s World Trade Institute (joint centre of the Universities of Bern, Fribourg and Neuchatel), where he was the top student of his graduating class. He completed his grain trade training with the Canadian International Grains Institute in Winnipeg, Canada and is originally a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), South Africa in commercial law and accounting.

Hilton runs the Cape Town office of the business. Contact Hilton Zunckel at hilton@hiltonlambert.com or on his Mobile at +27 72 783 3608